Free The Gradual by Christopher Priest

virtual silhouette, dark mounds bulking against the south-lit sea, hidden in the day by the dazzle of sunlight, hidden at night by the darkness. Mostly there was a haze, a dirty miasma, which drifted away from our coastline and spread sluggishly across the surface of the sea, blurring and concealing. From those islands I had gained no idea of what the Archipelago might really be like. Now I was seeing!
    This island against whose flower-clad wall we were sailing – was this one that might also be seen from the mainland? How far had we sailed from grim Questiur while I drank myself to sleep, then slept? And how long had I been sleeping?
    Although I fell happily into a whisky-fuelled sleep I had stirred several times in the night, once to visit the toilet, and after that I drifted between states of semi-slumber and semi-excitement until the daylight started lightening the sky beyond the porthole. I found my wristwatch – it showed the familiar time that at home I would normally get out of bed and wander down to find myself a breakfast. That was good, because I had not wanted to sleep through the day.
    I washed and dressed as quickly as I could, and while I was doing so I noticed that there were two clocks, or chronometers, already mounted in the cabin. They were built into the wall next to the door. One showed the same time as my watch, but the other was more than four hours ahead of that. I imagined that this must mean we had crossed one or more time zones during the night.
    Both clock faces had words inscribed on them that I could not understand. I guessed they were in island demotic. The one on the left was labelled
Mutlaq Vaqt
; the other was labelled
Kema Vaqt
.
    As soon as I was dressed I left the cabin and hurried along the companionway to try to find a way out to the upper decks. I passed several other members of the orchestra as I hurried along – I did not stop to speak to them. I found a door and broke out of the interior of the ship into hot, blinding sunlight. The white-painted superstructure of the ship reflected the glare, and I protected my eyes with an arm thrown across my forehead, but already I could see what I had come outside to find.
    We were passing through a waterway that was so straight, so neatly laid between the two sheer cliffs, that it could only have been artificial. The canal was just about wide enough for our ship, but there was not much spare. On the high cliffs of the canal there were a few bare areas where the blasting of the rock had left steep patches of baldness, but otherwise bushes, vines, flowers, grew in profusion. The scents from them were almost overwhelming.
    Ahead I could see that the narrow cleft was coming to an end. A stretch of open sea lay beyond. Soon enough the ship came to the end of the passage and as we moved out into the open it was possible to see when I looked back that a line of mountains ran across the island we had traversed, and that the canal was a deeper extension of what had once been a valley. The mountains stretched away as far as I could see in either direction.
    Other ships were hove to in the bay we were starting out across. As soon as we were clear of the entrance to the canal, the one waiting closest began turning, then headed towards it. It was a transport ship, an elongated tramp steamer of some kind, lying low in the water. Two large cranes stood on its deck. Its aft-mounted superstructure was dark and stained, and the hull was pock-marked with spreading patches of rust pushing up through the paintwork. There was an exchange of sirens between our ship and this one. A smell of coal dust drifted across to us.
    I saw another man standing at the rail. I recognized him as Ganner, a cellist who had sometimes played alongside me as a session musician. I walked across to him, glad to see a familiar face.
    ‘We seem to have travelled a long way already,’ I said. ‘Do you happen to know where we are?’
    ‘You’ve slept late,’ Ganner said