Tag: New Worlds

Track 12 by J. G. Ballard

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Track 12 by J. G. Ballard (New Worlds #70, April 1958) opens with Maxted listening to a sound Sheringham is playing to him through headphones. When Maxted fails to guess what the sound is—:

‘Time’s up,’ Sheringham cut in. ‘A pin dropping.’ He took the three-inch disc off the player, and angled it into its sleeve. ‘In actual fall, that is, not impact. We used a fifty-foot shaft and eight microphones. I thought you’d get that one.’  p. 63

The men take a break and go outside for a drink. We learn more about this new science of microsonics—very quiet sounds hugely amplified—and, as the story develops, we also discover that Maxted has been having an extra-marital relationship with Sheringham’s wife.
Maxted is waiting for a confrontation about this latter matter but, before one occurs, he starts to feel cold and mentions this to Sheringham. Sheringham tells him to stay where he is and goes to fetch the final recording.
Maxted’s condition continues to deteriorate, and it soon becomes apparent that (spoiler) Sherringham has poisoned him:

He strolled leisurely around the patio, scrutinizing Maxted from several angles. Evidently satisfied, he sat down on the table. He picked up the siphon and swirled the contents about. ‘Chromium cyanate. Inhibits the coenzyme system controlling the body’s fluid balances, floods hydroxyl ions into the bloodstream. In brief, you drown. Really drown, that is, not merely suffocate as you would if you were immersed in an external bath. However, I mustn’t distract you.’
He inclined his head at the speakers. Being fed into the patio was a curiously muffled spongy noise, like elastic waves lapping in a latex sea. The rhythms were huge and ungainly, overlaid by the deep leaden wheezing of a gigantic bellows. Barely audible at first, the sounds rose until they filled the patio and shut out the few traffic noises along the highway.
‘Fantastic, isn’t it?’ Sheringham said. [. . .] ‘These are 30-second repeats, 400 microsones, amplification one thousand. I admit I’ve edited the track a little, but it’s still remarkable how repulsive a beautiful sound can become. You’ll never guess what this was.’  p. 65-66

Sheringham then reveals his knowledge of Maxted’s liason—there are microphones all around the patio, an area that the couple used for one of their liaisons—and he continues to goad Maxted until finally revealing that he is drowning in a kiss.
This story doesn’t really lend itself to a convincing synopsis but Ballard successfully combines the two disparate story elements (the new science of microsonics and a cuckolded husband seeking revenge) with the almost poetic idea of drowning in a kiss. If that latter image/thought doesn’t appeal then I suspect you will not like it as much as I did.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 1,850 words. Story link.

The Half Pair by A. Bertram Chandler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Half Pair by A. Bertram Chandler (New Worlds, November 1957) sees the male member of a husband and wife prospecting team, halfway between Mars and the Asteroid Belt, complain about a missing cufflink that has been flushed out the garbage disposal into space. When his wife tells him she’ll get him another pair when they land, he is not impressed:

‘We agreed’, he said stiffly, ‘that we weren’t going to let ourselves lapse, get sloppy, the way that some prospecting couples do. You must remember those dreadful people we met on PX173A—the ones who asked us to dinner aboard their ship. He dressed in greasy overalls, she in what looked like a converted flour sack. The drinks straight from the bottle and the food straight from the can…’
‘That’, she told him, ‘was an extreme case.’
‘Admittedly. And my going around with my shirt sleeves rolled up, or flapping, would be the thin end of the wedge.’
He brooded. ‘What I can’t get over is the clottishness of it all. I go through into the bathroom to rinse out my shirt. I leave the cuff links on the ledge over the basin while I put the shirt on the stretcher to dry. Picking up the cuff links, to transfer them to a clean shirt, I drop one into the basin. It goes down the drain. I hurry to the engine-room to get a spanner to open the pipe at the U-bend. I return to find you filling the basin to wash your smalls. I tell you what’s happened—and you promptly pull out the plug, washing the link over and past the bend…’
‘I wanted to see,’ she said.
‘You wanted to see,’ he mimicked.  p. 90

This domestic squabbling continues until the man decides to don a spacesuit and go out to retrieve the missing link (he has seen it on the ship radar orbiting nearby). His wife protests as they are not meant to EVA solo, and she can’t go as she has been traumatised by a previous space walk.
Needless to say (spoiler), the man goes out on his own, loses his thruster, and then realises his safety line has become undone. His air supply runs out and he lapses into unconsciousness—but later wakes up in the ship. His wife tells him, in an explanation as to how she overcame her trauma, ‘I do so hate half a pair of anything—and I don’t mean only cuff links!’
This neat last line, and the couple’s verbal sparring throughout, make for a fun if lightweight piece.
*** (Good). 1800 words. Story link.

Hunger’s End by Robert Cheetham

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Hunger’s End by Robert Cheetham (New Worlds #171, March 1967) sees Caroline listening to Jimmy at a party. He says that physical beauty is valueless as it contributes nothing to functionality; she disagrees and, deciding that he doesn’t know what he is talking about, eventually dismisses him. As Caroline hands her glass to him so that he can get her another champagne, she notices a minute chip in it and deliberately drops it to the floor where it smashes.
The rest of the story alternates between Caroline’s adulterous affair with another man called David, who was at the party with his wife, and a sponge-like alien life-form that has been feeding on the seabed for aeons. The alien sponge is later harvested and put on sale, during which period it starts to starve. Caroline buys it (“huge, ovoid, delicately violet”).
The final scene (spoiler) has Caroline discussing her relationship with David on the phone before she goes to have a bath. She dreamily slips her finger into a hole in the sponge, and the alien bites it off. The story close with this:

“Then there’s the transiency of beauty,” said Jimmy. “Symmetry exists only so long as the apposite dimensional planes are exactly complimentary. Alter one side, change its shape by one iota, and symmetry, beauty, perfection, value—everything is gone.”  p. 126

I’m not convinced by the point the story is trying to make, or that it would stop Caroline attracting David, but I suppose it is a short and effective enough piece.
** (Average). 1,700 words. Story link.

The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race by J. G. Ballard

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race by J. G. Ballard (Ambit #29, 1966)1 does what the title promises:

Oswald was the starter.
From his window above the track he opened the race by firing the starting gun. It is believed that the first shot was not properly heard by all the drivers. In the following confusion Oswald fired the gun two more times, but the race was already under way.
Kennedy got off to a bad start.

The rest of this short piece provides a number of oblique observations about this historical event:

[It] has been suggested that the hostile local crowd, eager to see a win by the home driver Johnson, deliberately set out to stop [Kennedy] completing the race. Another theory maintains that the police guarding the track were in collusion with the starter, Oswald.

The final observation, “Who loaded the starting gun?”, is an effective finish.
I thought this was a striking piece when I first read it many years ago, but it is one that is bound to have less of an effect the second time around.
*** (Good). 700 words. Story link.

1. This piece (which was inspired by Alfred Jarry’s The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race) was reprinted in New Worlds #171, March 1967.

The Ersatz Wine by Christopher Priest

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Ersatz Wine by Christopher Priest (New Worlds #171, March 1967) opens with a man fleeing his pursuers and hiding from them in a building. Inside he sees a girl sitting at the bottom of a flight of stairs. She holds out her hand and takes him up to a room where they have sex. He leaves in the morning. His pursuers find him later, leaning against a pile of crates: they wonder how they can keep his batteries charged.
Inserted into this brief story are seemingly random passages:

“Two fat ladies: eighty-eight,” said the Bingo-caller.
“Three and seven: thirty-seven. Key of the door: twenty-one. On its own: number six. . . .”  p. 117

“My work,” said the Artist, “is a total expression of my soul. It relates in terms of colour and image the visual interpretation of consciousness.” His audience nodded and smiled, staring in serious awe at the canvas behind the Artist. It was daubed with shredded inner-tubes and random streaks of motor-oil.  p. 117

Some of these may have an oblique connection to the story:

“What right have we to keep this man alive?” demanded the Surgeon. “Transistors and batteries are bastardising God’s work!”  p. 118

“My life,” said the Actor, “is a constant lie.”  p. 118

A taste of what was to come in the pages of the large format New Worlds.
– (Poor). 1,650 words. Story link.

The Keys to December by Roger Zelazny

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Keys to December by Roger Zelazny (New Worlds #165, August 1966)1 begins with the birth of Jarry Dark, a modified human who needs a specialised environment (in his case, a temperature of -50°C and gravity of 3.2 gees). When the planet for which he has been designed is destroyed by a supernova, his sponsoring company, General Mining, provide hermetically sealed environments for him and all the other genemods like him.
The rest of the first few pages sees Jarry and the other 28,000 of his kind form the December Club: they pool their money, Jarry makes even more for them on the markets, and they finally buy their own world and start terraforming it.
The next part of the story sees the 28,000 arrive on the planet and enter cold sleep, although small groups are rostered to stay awake for short periods to supervise the twenty World Change machines and their three thousand year task.
During Jarry and his wife Sanza’s first shift, they see the effect the changes are having on the planet’s wildlife:

One morning, as they watched, they saw one of the biped creatures of the iodine forests moving across the land. It fell several times, picked itself up, continued, fell once more, lay still.
“What is it doing this far from its home?” asked Sanza.
“Dying,” said Jarry. “Let’s go outside.”
They crossed a catwalk, descended to the first floor, donned their protective suits and departed the installation.
The creature had risen to its feet and was staggering once again. It was covered with a reddish down, had dark eyes and a long, wide nose, lacked a true forehead. It had four brief digits, clawed, upon each hand and foot.
When it saw them emerge from the Worldchange unit, it stopped and stared at them. Then it fell.
They moved to its side and studied it where it lay.
It continued to stare at them, its dark eyes wide, as it lay there shivering.
“It will die if we leave it here,” said Sanza.
“. . . And it will die if we take it inside,” said Jarry.
It raised a forelimb toward them, let it fall again. Its eyes narrowed, then closed.
Jarry reached out and touched it with the toe of his boot. There was no response.
“It’s dead,” he said.

Later, Sanza expresses doubts about what they are doing to the planet:

“It’s funny,” she said, “but the thought just occurred to me that we’re doing here what was done to us. They made us for Alyonal, and a nova took it away. These creatures came to life in this place, and we’re taking it away. We’re turning all of life on this planet into what we were on our former worlds—misfits.”
“The difference, however, is that we are taking our time,” said Jarry, “and giving them a chance to get used to the new conditions.”
“Still, I feel that all that—outside there”—she gestured toward the window—“is what this world is becoming: one big Deadland.”
“Deadland was here before we came. We haven’t created any new deserts.”
“All the animals are moving south. The trees are dying. When they get as far south as they can go and still the temperature drops and the air continues to burn in their lungs—then it will be all over for them.”
“By then they might have adapted. The trees are spreading, are developing thicker barks. Life will make it.”
“I wonder. . . .”

This conflict limns the rest of the story. After they do a solo shift each, they spend the next one together, and see that the planet’s life has started to adapt. They find strange signs outside their stations. Also, around the same time, one of the other watchers develops an alcohol equivalent which they use to celebrate the millennium.
On later shifts the atmosphere has changed enough for the pair to spend short periods outside, and they see further markings outside the stations, and dead animals that appear to have been left as offerings. This latter, which occurs around twelve hundred years in, leads Jarry and Sanza to suspect that the animals they know as Redforms are becoming intelligent.
When they subsequently visit the tribe of the creatures to investigate they see several of the creatures being attacked by a large bear-like creature. Jarry kills it with a laser, and then dismounts the sled to examine the Redforms, only to be attacked by a second bear he hasn’t noticed. After he recovers from the bear’s initial blow he stabs it in the throat with a knife. At the same time Sanza drives the sled into it and kills herself in the crash. As Jarry starts walking back to the station with her body one of the Redforms retrieves his knife from the body of the bear.
On his return he wakens the executive, and asks him what he should do with Sanza’s body, as none of them have yet died on this world. They suggest burial or cremation and, when Jarry chooses the latter, they let him borrow the large aircar: he takes her to a mountain top, gets airborne again, and uses the laser to level it—the “first pyre this world has seen.” Jarry then goes back into cold-sleep.
The next time Jarry wakes (spoiler) he reads a report stating that the Redforms will die out at the current rate of terraforming. Then, when he goes to visit the Redforms, he sees they now have fire and spears, and opposable digits on their hands (the rate of evolution is the story’s one weak point). After Jarry subsequently manages to learn how to speak to the Redforms, he wakens the executive committee once more, and asks for the project to be slowed down to give them a chance. When he fails to convince them, Jarry proposes waking the membership for a vote, but no-one seconds him. Later though, after he destroys two stations, they agree. To make sure he isn’t double crossed, Jarry tells them that he has trained the Redforms to use laser projectors to destroy the remaining stations if he does not visit by dawn. One of the committee members, after realising they are beaten, asks him a question:

“Why did you do it, Jarry?” he asked. “What are they to you that you would make your own people suffer for them?”
“Since you do not feel as I feel,” said Jarry, “my reasons would mean nothing to you. After all, they are only based upon my feelings, which are different than your own—for mine are based upon sorrow and loneliness. Try this one, though: I am their god. My form is to be found in their every camp. I am the Slayer of Bears from the Desert of the Dead. They have told my story for two and a half centuries, and I have been changed by it. I am powerful and wise and good, so far as they are concerned. In this capacity, I owe them some consideration. If I do not give them their lives, who will there be to honor me in snow and chant my story around the fires and cut for me the best portions of the woolly caterpillar? None, Turl. And these things are all that my life is worth now. Awaken the others. You have no choice.”
“Very well,” said Turl. “And if their decision should go against you?”
“Then I’ll retire, and you can be god,” said Jarry.

Jarry does not go back into cold sleep afterwards, and spends his remaining time with the tribe. The story is not explicit about whether or not he gets his way, although my suspicion is that he does.
This is a very good and emotionally affecting story, and it is probably one of favourite Zelazny pieces. I’d also note that it is a work that combines his stylistic prowess with a heavyweight theme—I often find his stories are often heavy on style and poetry and larger than life characters, but are sometimes light on content. In this case, I suspect the terraforming/extinction theme was influenced by the ecology movements of the time.
**** (Very Good). 8,900 words. Story link.

1. Because this was published in a British magazine it did not appear on that year’s Hugo or Nebula ballot, but did appear on the latter when it was subsequently reprinted in the Wolheim/Carr Best of the Year. The story should probably have one or the other awards, although Harlan Ellison’s Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes would have been strong competition.

Old Hundredth by Brian W. Aldiss

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Old Hundredth by Brian W. Aldiss (New Worlds #100, November 1960) is set on a far future Earth where humanity has departed and only animals are left; it opens with Dandi Lashadusa (who we later discover is an uplifted sloth-like creature) passing a musicolumn:

When old Dandi Lashadusa came riding down that dusty road on her megatherium, the column began to intone. It was just an indigo stain in the air, hardly visible, for it represented only a bonded pattern of music locked into the fabric of that particular area of space. It was also a transubstantio-spatial shrine, the eternal part of a being that had dematerialised itself into music.  p. 63

Dandi dismounts near the column to listen to its music, and telepathically communes with her tetchy mentor half a world away in Beterbroe. He ignores Dandi’s suggestion to look at the view through her eyes, and he instead provides a trenchant critique of an unnamed piece of music that is of significance to Dandi. The conversation then briefly touches on to her tentative plans to die, before she gets back on the megatherium and continues on.
As Dandi travels towards her next stop, the Involute (“it seemed to hang irridial above the ground a few leagues on”), we learn that, in this far future, the Moon has left Earth to orbit the Sun, and that Earth and Venus now orbit each other. We also learn about humanity’s expansion throughout the solar system, and their development of the Laws of Intergration, which ultimately led to the construction of the transubstantio-spatialisers used to project them onto the pattern of reality. They never came back.
When Dandi arrives at the Involute her mentor senses her dark thoughts. He tells her that moping does not become her, and that she should return home, and adds that he does not want to hear any more about the music she has chosen for her swan song. She replies that she is lonely:

He shot her a picture from another of his wards before leaving her. Dandi had seen this ward before in similar dream-like glimpses. It was a huge mole creature, still boring underground as it had been for the last twenty years. Occasionally it crawled through vast caves; once it swam in a subterranean lake; most of the while it just bored through rock. Its motivations were obscure to Dandi, although her mentor referred to it as ‘a geologer.’ Doubtless if the mole was vouchsafed occasional glimpses of Dandi and her musicolumnology, it would find her as baffling. At least the mentor’s point was made; loneliness was psychological, not statistical.
Why, a million personalities glittered almost before her eyes!  p. 68

The last part of the story (spoiler) sees Dandi arrive at her old home in Crotheria. When she goes to look at her old house she is confronted by an uplifted bear—transgressive creatures that are the only ones who wish to emulate “man’s old aggressiveness”. Dandi panics and summons her mentor (now revealed as an uplifted dolphin). He takes control of her body and moves to kill the bear, but Dandi fights her mentor and tells the creature to flee. The enraged mentor throws Dandi’s elephant-sized body against the wall and the house begins to collapse. She jumps to safety.
Dandi later realises, when she hears nothing further from her mentor, that she has been excommunicated. She continues her journey until she comes to a suitable spot, frees her mount, and proceeds with her plan:

Locking herself into thought disciplines, Dandi began to dissolve. Man had needed machines to help him do it, to fit into the Involutes. She was a lesser animal: she could unbutton herself into the humbler shape of a musicolumn. It was just a matter of rearranging—and without pain she formed into a pattern that was not a shaggy megatherim body . . . but an indigo column, hardly visible . . .
Lass for a long while cropped thistle and cacti. Then she ambled forward to seek the hairy creature she fondly—and a little condescendingly—regarded as her equal. But of the sloth there was no sign.
Almost the only landmark was a faint violet-blue dye in the air. As the baluchitherium mare approached, a sweet old music grew in volume from the dye. It was a music almost as old as the landscape itself and certainly as much travelled, a tune once known to men as The Old Hundredth. And there were voices singing: “All creatures that on Earth do dwell . . .”  p. 73

There isn’t much of a story here, and the pleasure that this piece provides comes from (a) its exotic and elegiac descriptions of a pastoral far-future Earth, and (b) its transcendent, sense-of-wonder ending. I thought this was an excellent story the first time I read it but, this time around, it was apparent that part of its charm is the novelty of its touching last line.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4,300 words. Story link.

The White Leopard by Michael Swanwick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The White Leopard by Michael Swanwick (New Worlds, 2022) sees Ray, the war veteran protagonist, buy an old ground drone at a yard sale:

What it was, was an RQ-6G Leopard.
The 6G was, in Ray’s opinion, the finest patrol and reconnaissance ground drone ever made. He had qualified on it during Operation Bolivian Freedom, back when he was young. He had hunted down insurgents with one, working from a combat recliner in a secure base across the border in Argentina. He’d known what it felt like to be the most dangerous thing in the jungle at night. He had never experienced anything like that before.
He wanted to feel something like that again.  pp. 87-88

After repairing the Leopard, Ray hooks up to a VR set one night and sends the drone out into the forest. After chasing raccoons and the like for a while, he senses another Leopard in the forest. He contacts the operator, and finds out it is a woman called Helen: she challenges him to find her. When he does they explore the forest together.
Eventually, after a period getting to know each other, they arrange to meet in person at a restaurant. When they arrive, however, they are horrified by what they see across the room: Helen is older than Ray expected, and using a walker, and she is equally horrified by the old, pot-bellied and balding Ray. They both flee. Then, when Ray gets home to his wife Doris, an alcoholic shrew of a woman—but a smart one who has used her previous tech skills to work out what Ray has been doing—she guesses what has happened at the restaurant, and turns the knife, “She was old, wasn’t she? Old like you.”
Ray flees downstairs and straps on his VR set, and sees that Helen’s Leopard is perched on the limb of a nearby tree waiting for his drone—“That’s not who I am,” she says.
The rest of the story details (spoiler), in parallel with the Ray and Helen’s further excursions, Doris’s increasing bitterness about Ray’s extra-marital relationship: she eventually threatens to tell the police about his “terrorist weapon” unless he blows it up and then kills Helen with his own hands. Ray and Helen then conspire to kill Olive, and the story proceeds to an ending where Olive gets the drop on both of them (those tech skills again): she scares off Helen, and then wears a triumphant smile as the Leopard comes down into the basement for Ray. There is a good payoff line:

There was the strong, willful woman he had fallen in love with all those many long years ago.  p. 98

The beginning of this is pretty good in its depiction of old people wanting to recapture their youth, but the back end is more a series of plot manoeuvres, and there is perhaps a little too much going on in that part of the story. Still, not a bad piece.
*** (Good). 3,900 words.

Tell-Tale Tit by Margo Lanagan

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Tell-Tale Tit by Margo Lanagan (New Worlds, 2022) is a short piece that begins with all of England’s dogs being brought together to feed on the tongues that have been cut from the mouths of “tattles” (“women, mostly, because telling tales has always been a woman’s offence”):

There is always some gentleman complaining in the parliament of the cost of this waiting, this gathering, this holding. Would it not be more efficient, he wonders, to take in smaller batches of tattles and of dogs, closer to the conviction dates, hard upon each assizes, and closer also to the district where the judgements are passed?
Whereupon other good sirs leap up to correct him: It is a national scourge, this betrayal, this calumny, and should be dealt with in a nationalised manner. The horror is not for the fact that a dog, any local dog, should have a taste of you, but that every dog in England shall have his little bit. A convicted tattle should never know whether any dog she meets thereafter contains a particle of herself. She has become dog, and that knowledge is brought home to her, not only by her silence but also by the sight of any representative of the creatures from wolfhound to lady’s lap dog, forever after.  p. 115

The rest is not much more than a (grisly) description of how offenders’ tongues are surgically removed in the Cutting Hall, ground up, and then fed to the massed pack of dogs in the Distribution Hall (the narrator’s job is to ladle out the minced tongue meat to the animals). While the dogs eat, the punished and the public watch on.
There is no story here, just a descriptive account of a bizarre practice—but it is a striking and immersive piece for all that.
*** (Good). 2,750 words.

The Voices of Time by J. G. Ballard

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Voices of Time by J. G. Ballard (New Worlds #99, October 1960) opens with Powers reflecting on the suicide of his colleague Whitby, and the strange grooves the dead man cut on the floor of an empty swimming pool:

An inch deep and twenty feet long, interlocking to form an elaborate ideogram like a Chinese character, they had taken him all summer to complete, and he had obviously thought about little else, working away tirelessly through the long desert afternoons. Powers had watched him from his office window at the far end of the Neurology wing, carefully marking out his pegs and string, carrying away the cement chips in a small canvas bucket. After Whitby’s suicide no one had bothered about the grooves, but Powers often borrowed the supervisor’s key and let himself into the disused pool, and would look down at the labyrinth of mouldering gulleys, half-filled with water leaking in from the chlorinator, an enigma now past any solution.  p. 91

This is just the first piece of strangeness that we are introduced to in this story, and we soon learn that Powers is one of a number of people who are beginning to sleep for increasing periods of time (a number of “terminals” are already in permanent comas). We also are introduced to an ex-patient of Powers’ called Kaldren who, after a recent operation, never sleeps at all, and who intermittently stalks Powers to pass on a series of decreasing numbers (the first one we see is 96,688,365,498,721, scribbled in the dust on the windscreen of his car). Kaldren also has a girlfriend called Coma (quite apt given the situation with Powers and the other narcoma sufferers).
There is more of this kind of thing when Powers spots a creature trapped at the bottom of the empty swimming pool, a frog that has grown a lead carapace, one of a number of organisms that have started growing shells for radiological protection. Later on, when Powers shows Coma round Whitby’s laboratory, we see even odder creatures (an intelligent chimp, a mutated anemone, etc.), specimens that have been irradiated to switch on their “silent pair” genes, in the belief that that this will trigger a massive move up the evolutionary slope.
This is all intriguing stuff, but many of these ideas are never fully realised, and the remainder of the story focuses on Powers’ decreasing periods of wakefulness, as well as his creation of a mandala (presumably similar to Whitby’s design) on a target at an Air Force weapons range. During this period Powers also visits Kaldren’s house, and we learn about the latter’s bizarre preoccupations which, among other things, include the series of decreasing numbers mentioned previously. We discover that they are being received from deep space, and may be a countdown to the end of the Universe.
The final section (spoiler) sees Powers irradiate the laboratory specimens and himself with the X-ray machine. When he goes outside afterwards he can sense the age of the landscape and then, when he reaches the mandala, he tunes into the “time-song” of the stars above him:

Like an endless river, so broad that its banks were below the horizons, it flowed steadily towards him, a vast course of time that spread outwards to fill the sky and the universe, enveloping everything within them. Moving slowly, the forward direction of its majestic current almost imperceptible, Powers knew that its source was the source of the cosmos itself. As it passed him, he felt its massive magnetic pull, let himself be drawn into it, borne gently on its powerful back. Quietly it carried him away, and he rotated slowly, facing the direction of the tide. Around him the outlines of the hills and the lake had faded, but the image of the mandala, like a cosmic clock, remained fixed before his eyes, illuminating the broad surface of the stream. Watching it constantly, he felt his body gradually dissolving, its physical dimensions melting into the vast continuum of the current, which bore him out into the centre of the great channel sweeping him onward, beyond hope now but at rest, down the broadening reaches of the river of eternity.  p. 121

This is a story that has some striking ideas and impressive passages, but they never really click into place—other than in Ballard’s head,1 I guess, or perhaps as some sort of entropic tone-poem. So an ambitious piece then, but not an entirely satisfying one.
I’d also add in passing that I think this work presages the likes of The Terminal Beach and his other “concentrated” stories, in that it presents a number of core images or obsessions unconnected (or largely unconnected) by conventional narrative links.
*** (Good). 12,700 words. Story link.

1. Although I generally admire Ballard’s writing (and would put The Kindness of Women on my top five novels list), I occasionally get the feeling I’m reading about the obsessions of a psychiatric patient.