(urth) short story 7: The Green Wall Said

[Marc Aramini]

The Green Wall Said

This is probably Wolfe’s first somewhat cryptic story in which it is very difficult to draw an accurate conclusion, and it is my favorite of “Young Wolfe”.  It was published in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds in 1967.  It may be a biological survey done on a human sample group by aliens, as I see little evidence that is a behavioral or spriritual one.

SUMMARY: Five people of diverse backgrounds, including a businessman, a prisoner, a helicopter man in armor, a nun, and a man on safari or working with aboriginals are collected in a small white half-domed room, trying to figure out what they have in common to be there.  The wall is iridescent green and as they try to figure out any rhyme or reason to their presence in the room, it flashes messages.

The entirety of the message is as follows “This is a meeting/a symposium/call this a council/you will not be harmed/are you afraid/ nothing will harm you/ let us explain/  we are an ancient race / our laws are just/ you may depend upon us / to always function rationally / we had begun our evolution as / intelligent beings / during your planet’s / carboniferous age / we need / information a technique / if we are to / survive longer/ as a race/ because we cannot as all of / you do sacrifice/ as individuals all / our lives for the kind/ and now our springs / of being fail / how do you do it / how do you do it – do you do it”

They come to the conclusion they are a poor selection for diversity with only one woman, all English speakers.  The prisoner ends the story by asking, “I wonder if they got cancer research here too”.

COMMENTARY:  
This is a bit inscrutable, but the aliens do say they can be trusted to always function rationally.  The religious backgrounds of the people are a Church of England, a Baptist, a Jew, a seventh day Adventist, and a Catholic Sister.  When the business man suggests perhaps the aliens just grabbed what was available, the room tilts five degrees.  This is also at the point where the wall reveals the springs of being are failing.  The man working with the aborigines mentions a clinic, and the prisoner seems to go to one as well.

The cancer research line seems important, and perhaps sexual recombination is also important, for undifferentiated archaic single celled organisms have no need to expend energy in sexual differentiation and never sacrifice the energy of the self to create sex cells for recombination – energy that represents a lost battle to entropy in sexual recombination.  Thus the individual’s energy is spent not on keeping its cells together but on creating new sex cells – the cost of sex biologically is death to the individual, and I feel like the alien’s green wall is flirting with this.

Cancer cells are effectively immortal and reproduce without limit – they do not have the cellular mechanism to turn off replication in place anymore.  Are the aliens like a cancer?  A cancer that has now stopped its eternal replicating since the “springs of being fail?”  Do they think cancer is the natural state and that organisms decide to stop that replication and devote it to sexual recombination instead so that their cells collectively die but their progeny will live?

The last line “how do you do it – do you do it” seems a question for sure – perhaps it is simply innate and biologically programmed, when the aliens thought it was a choice.  The stutter seems a question rather than a malfunction, even though the springs of being are failing.

Is the study biological rather than behavioral?  Is it about cancer or recombination?  What exactly does the sacrifice of the individual mean?  The wall says “ALL” of you do it, so it seems innate.

ALLUSIONS:  I don’t think this is confronting the Green Wall and the Panopticon in We. In that, the green wall seperates people from nature, and they are treated as a number.  Well, in this story, the prisoner HAS a number … but I am still not willing to claim this is a direct allusion, as the themes seem vastly different.

While all of the religions of each character is mentioned and sacrifice seems a huge tenet of Christianity, I can't see how that could make more sense than a biological thrust to the reason for their symposium/meeting/council because it does not seem that they are required to DO anything except show the wall HOW they sacrifice as individuals.  

FUTURE ECHOES:
Well, this is the first chronological Wolfe story that made me think “WTF?” but it won’t be the last.  That’s okay; I like that feeling.  Cause and effect is a bit more obscured in this one.  The inscrutable but supposedly straightforward intentions of aliens will be repeated over and over in Wolfe.

Since there is no mention of hunger and the wall says they will not be harmed, there is no indication that their sojourn in the little room will end in cannibalism or self-sacrifice.