FSF, April 2007 Page 12

  Then, during the summer of love, there was a story floating around—this was something Bert could speak of authoritatively, he'd heard it while he was at Findhorn—that some people were actually turning green and becoming part of the northwestern forests, but he'd heard it from a friend of a friend of a friend, and he'd assumed the tale was probably apocryphal, at least until he heard it from a zoned-out hippie in the Haight that no, it wasn't something the Cockettes were doing for a show, it was actually happening, there was some really powerful new dope, Something Green—no, that was the name of it, Something Green—and that if you smoked enough of it, or ate it in brownies, or something like that, maybe you had to shoot it, he was pretty zoned out, you could really turn green, he knew it was true because his girlfriend, or maybe she was his boyfriend, it was getting harder to tell, had turned green and was living in Golden Gate Park now, soaking up rays—

  And while Bert still didn't believe it then, it was supposed to be good luck to see a green person—or fuck a green person. It depended on who was telling the story. And apparently, if you had sex with a green person, you could turn green too. And it was supposed to be the greatest high of all time. It was starting to sound like a body-snatcher thing, and that's why when they remade the movie, they set it in San Francisco, except that this was supposed to be a good thing. An organic thing.

  There was more. But if you tried to fit all the different pieces together, you couldn't. Most of it sounded pretty bizarre anyway; you had to wonder if there might be some kind of Jungian archetype at work, maybe the collective subconscious of the left coast was creating a new mythology because the people caught up in it had some weird psychological need to believe in benign otherness. Or, if that didn't sit right, you could always invest in the inevitable conspiracy theory—that some secret agency that didn't have a name was infecting leftist troublemakers with a chlorophyll virus that mutated them into plants.

  But underneath the stories, there was a consistent thread, and as near as I could translate it into English from Bert's semi-coherent chronology, the whole thing had started when somebody, some mad scientist somewhere, had hypothesized that the way out of the Malthusian bear-trap was to give humans the ability to photosynthesize sugars the way plants do. That way, we could stand out in the sunlight, and instead of getting a tan, we'd generate chlorophyllins, and we'd turn green instead of brown; and all those little green chloroplasts, or whatever they were called, would happily turn sunlight into blood-sugar. The green people were the survivors or the descendants or the escaped lab rats of these experiments. Other versions of the tale had the chlorophyll virus coming from secret biological warfare laboratories; sometimes the associated name was Mengele, sometimes it was Jonas Salk. A lot of misinformation had attached to the story, like conversational barnacles. The green mythos was a colossal game of Russian telephone, and if there had ever been a nugget of truth in the telling, it was long since buried under an avalanche of paranoid bullshit.

  Oh yeah, one more thing. The Green Party. You know, the political movement called The Green Party? Supposedly, at their core, at the innermost secret center of the whole global network, you'll find a holy nexus of green people functioning as the spiritual leaders, speaking transcendant sunlit truths to those who function as the visible public leaders of the movement. Those who are in on the secret dedicate their entire lives to the movement because they aspire to earn the right to ascend into green godhood. There are private conclaves in secret glades, that kind of thing.

  That was Bert. And that's most of what he said in five days. But he was dependable and he was thorough in a brusque, military way. His motivations and opinions might be scattered all over the landscape, but he produced results.

  Ernie, on the other hand, was here for the adventure. He didn't really believe in the green people, but maybe he did. Because if they really existed, wouldn't it be cool to turn green and just live in total cosmic harmony with all the other plants in the forest, stretching your leaves up to the sun and soaking in the life-giving warmth and—

  Yeah, Ernie just wanted to be green. Maybe he thought it would be easier than being black. I dunno. Oh, I should also mention that Ernie had a doctorate in biology, believe it or don't. He'd worked on the genome project and now he was a seed-gatherer for the Genetic Bank—you know, the one that the Benford Foundation set up to preserve the world's genetic diversity. It was a perfect job for him, because he could take off into the hills almost any time he felt like it and someone else would pay for the trip. As long as he brought back seeds.

  And me? I'm just this fading science fiction writer wondering where his next Hugo is coming from. (And no, I'm not going to adopt another child just to win another award. One was enough, thanks. It was good advice when Connie Willis first suggested it to me in 1991, but not now. In gratitude, I'm organizing a write-in campaign to elect her the next president of the Science Fiction Writers of America.)

  But I knew why I was here. If I could prove to myself that I hadn't hallucinated the whole thing, I'd be happy. I don't mind going senile, I just want to know that I'm going senile.

  We didn't do a lot of talking that first evening. We were too tired. And cold. So as soon as we could, we settled in for the night. Except for the exquisitely well-placed rocks, the ground was almost soft enough to be comfortable. I slept between Bert and Ernie. Ernie farts and Bert snores, but I was warm, so I didn't complain—although I did wake up with a splitting headache and still exhausted. Who ever said camping was fun? I've had fun, this wasn't it. This wasn't even on the same page as fun. Instead of breakfast, we had energy drinks and granola bars. I will never insult an Egg McMuffin again.

  We spent the first three or four hours walking some warmth back into our bones. Mine made noises like tap-dancing pixies every time I moved. The ground was less rocky up here, but it was still uphill, and the elevation was enough that I spent most of the day either moving slowly or simply trying to catch my breath. Bert and Ernie didn't say anything, but we all knew they could have made a lot better time without me.

  At some point in the morning, while staring up at the pines—everything smelled of pine, real pine, not the kind of smell you get from those little cardboard trees that hang from the rearview mirror—at some point, I realized I didn't really have to be here. Once I'd shown them where I cut through the wire, I was done. I could have stayed in the van and driven down to Red Bluff with Emmett Grogan. I think that was when I began having that inevitable internal conversation about commitment, obsession, and damned foolishness. In the cold clear light of morning my head felt cold, clear, and light. And the whole business of little naked boys, green or otherwise, being hunted by guys in cowboy hats and sunglasses, guys who smelled of cigars and sweat, suddenly started to feel ... well, stupid.

  And then I started thinking how stupid Bert and Ernie must be to come out here just because I'd said I'd seen a green person—well, that and a bloodstained blanket and a couple of bloody bandages. Either I was awfully convincing, and yeah, I can be awfully convincing, or they were awfully gullible—or worse, they were true believers. And true believers are the worst kind. They're the ones to whom facts are disposable.

  Sometime around two or three in the afternoon, we reached the place where the stream forked. We'd come up between the two legs and now stood on the banks of a pond roughly the size of a football field. The water rippled peacefully under the crisp afternoon breeze. A low concrete berm defined the lower part of the pond. The larger of the two streams poured over a sloping dam; a break in the berm fed the smaller. We refilled our canteens here; the water was bitterly cold. It had probably been lying white on the ground somewhere in the highlands for a few months, until it decided to move down here.

  We found a small footbridge over the larger stream; on the other side was a hint of a trail. Not a lot of traffic came through here, but enough to have packed the soil. It could have just as easily been an animal highway as a human one, probably the deer and the bears came down to the pond to
drink; but the pond was artificial and that had to mean something. If plants need water, then that means green people need it too, right? “Do green people drink water?” Ernie asked. “Or do they just suck moisture from the ground with their toes? Like osmosis?” (Which led him inevitably into a riddle. “The answer is osmosis, what's the question?” “Who led the children of Israel out of Oz?")

  I offered my not-so-humble opinion that green people do drink water in its liquid form. I pointed out that I had given the injured green boy a water bottle and once he had figured out how it worked, he had sucked at it thirstily. So obviously, green people do have working mouths. And they're smart enough not to use them for terrible puns.

  After a bit of wrangling, we decided to follow the path north—in absolute silence, and with frequent stops to listen for oncoming traffic. Periodically, we'd step off the trail and listen quietly. Where we could, we used our binoculars, or the telephoto lenses on our cameras to examine distant slopes. But so far, we'd seen nothing out of the ordinary, and if we encountered anyone, we would have been just what we pretended to be—three stupid hikers, lost because we were following our trail map upside down.

  The trail wandered away from the stream that fed the pond, and then occasionally wandered back toward it. Higher up, the path began to look more purposeful, but we still saw no evidence that anyone had passed this way recently.

  Our second night, we found what looked like it might have been a hunter's blind. It was a wooden deck, raised half a meter off the ground and surrounded by foliage. It overlooked a wide meadow; the stream had widened here and a small shallow pond had formed. Another convenient watering hole. Probably a seasonal phenomenon. By the end of summer, it would be a dusty patch of hardened earth marked by the impatient scrapings of deer hooves.

  Inside the blind, we had what would have passed for comfort, if any of us actually remembered what comfort was. My feet were cold, my legs were cold, my knees were cold and noisy; and my bladder hurt, even though I'd been trying to pee all day—or maybe because I'd been trying to pee all day. My nose was running, my head still ached, and despite all the menthol drops I'd been sucking on, I had a terrible cough and my throat was starting to hurt. Bert boiled some water and shredded some tree bark into it and gave it to me to drink. God knows what it was, but it wasn't tea. For some reason, Ernie started to construct an elaborate pun about finding a bar soon for his deep throat, but Bert reached over and stuck a fork through his trachea and that kept him occupied for a while, at least until the bleeding stopped. To my dying day, I promise, I will not want to know the rest. And if somehow someone accidentally inflicts it on me anyway, I promise I will not pass it on.

  Once again, I slept between the two of them—I was beginning to figure it out, they weren't doing me any favors; they didn't like each other all that much and neither of them wanted to be next to the other. I tossed and turned for a while, then drifted into a truly horrible dream where one of my readers was following me around, taking care of my every little need, and giving me adoring puppy-dog looks. It was hideous. I woke up shaking—and grateful that so far in my career I have managed to avoid real fame. (And no, Star Trek doesn't count. That's borrowed glory, not something I created myself.)

  In the morning, I was feeling marginally better. Marginally is a euphemism for “not at all.” But at least I knew I was alive, because I was experiencing pain. Trust me, Descartes had it wrong. What he meant to say was, “I hurt, therefore I am."

  So we sat for a while and watched the meadow. I think a large part of that decision was that inside the blind it was still warm from our combined body heat. Outside, it would be cold and the cold would start biting our noses and ears very quickly. We sat quietly, sipping cold energy drinks and gnawing at cold-hardened granola bars, and pondered the biology of green people. This is when I found out that Ernie had a doctorate in ecological biosystems.

  See, a human being running around naked in the high forests would die of exposure, three days max, probably a lot sooner. Depends on the weather. That's because humans are mammals, warm-blooded, and our bodies maintain a stable body temperature by something called homeostasis, and we have to burn lots of food to maintain our 98.6. Cold-blooded creatures, on the other hand, they get warmer or colder with their surroundings. That's why crocodiles have to lie out in the sun every morning, to warm themselves up enough to move. But the green people, if they've turned part plant, then obviously they're not completely mammalian anymore. Something about the chloroplasts (or whatever it is they've got) is either supplying enough energy to maintain homeostasis—not really likely, plants have a much slower metabolic rate than animals—or it's turning these people into some kind of cold-blooded creatures.

  Ernie explained (I'm leaving out the puns, you're welcome) that the problem with cold weather is that when temperatures drop to freezing, the water in plant cells turns to ice. The ice fractures the cell structures. When the ice melts, the result is mush. Have you ever tried celery that's been frozen and thawed? No? Try it. While some plants actually depend on frost to help strip off last year's dead outer layers, most of the smaller plants beat winter by dying and leaving their seeds or roots or bulbs safe in the (relative) warmth of the earth. Trees, of course, well—they're trees. They shed their dead leaves and wait patiently for the snow to melt and water their roots. But that wouldn't work for greenies. Being mobile takes work, a greenie has to burn a lot of energy. So a greenie's metabolism would need to maintain some basic level of homeostasis to keep his body temperature above freezing, right?

  Ernie wasn't given to speculation, that's my job. The most I could get out of him was a grudging admittance that if people really are turning green and running around naked in the forests, then the process has to involve a lot more than a little chlorophyll under the skin. We both agreed that green people would probably need to find sunny places every morning, to warm up like crocodiles. The meadow we were watching, for instance, would be a great place for that—but by half past ten, it was fairly obvious that no green people were going to come here, and we were going to have to resume our search for them.

  Today, the hills were steeper, and unfortunately, we were on the downside of the steep, so our progress was a lot slower. It was like carrying your grandmother uphill the whole way. And maybe her Mah Jongg club as well. The longer the day went on, the more weight she gained. She's just gotta stop noshing on those latkes with sour cream and applesauce.

  About noon, I assumed it was noon, the sun was high overhead, we arrived at another field, this one fairly well exposed. The day had warmed up enough that the three of us just stopped and stood out in the sun, trying to soak up some warmth. And while we did that, I began to get a sense of what it might be like to be green. It was like standing in a hot shower, just letting the water cascade down, simultaneously enervating and energizing. It was very easy for me to dream of a hot shower—I was already starting to stink, and Bert and Ernie had passed that point before we'd even gotten out of the van.

  But standing out there in that field, basking in the warmth of the blazing star, soaking in its life-giving energy—I could have done that forever. And if that was what it was to be green, only much more intensely, I could see why people would seek it out.

  And then, abruptly, it was time to move on. I asked a dumb question about the energy levels in the average mammal and Ernie used that as a starting point for a circuitous lecture about ADHD being the natural state for survival in the wild and that most higher-level mammals exhibited all the symptoms of hyperactive behavior. This led, inevitably—inevitably for Ernie, that is—to his elaborate account of Tearalong (The Dotted Lion), and how to identify sexual identity confusion in cats. Apparently they couldn't get this particular lion to come out of the wardrobe. Finally, they just opened a store buying and selling wardrobes, and called it Narnia Business. (I'll show you on the map where we buried Ernie. Maybe we should have killed him first, but we were in a hurry.)

  The rest of the day was spent hi
king upward, always upward—and finally, I had the smarts to ask why we hadn't started at the north end and journeyed south. Bert shrugged. “Do the opposite of the obvious.” As if that little bit of left-coast-Zen was answer enough. But by this time, I didn't have the strength to argue. I just concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. Ernie, who had experienced only a mild case of death, didn't even bother to go for the easy pun, so apparently my two companions were also getting tired and frustrated.

  Late afternoon, however, we finally found something. Well, a promise of something. We came to an old dirt road; at some point in the past, a bulldozer had cut a single lane through the trees. There were tire tracks here, but not recent ones, so after all three of us had stated the obvious, that a road has to lead somewhere, as well as the not-so-obvious, that it would be a lot easier to follow the road than hike up another damned rocky hill, we decided to follow it. As before, we stopped frequently to listen for vehicles, but the only thing we heard was our own labored breathing, and occasionally the pounding of the blood between my ears.

  I'm not sure how far we followed the road, it could have been two or three miles, maybe more, I honestly don't know how deep into the forest that hunting preserve extended, but after a couple of hours, the dirt road led us to some kind of camp. As soon as we spotted the first outlying buildings in the distance, we backed away. We didn't know if there were people there or not. So, we hiked back a ways, then climbed up a hill—always up, never down; remember that the next time you're invited hiking—to a point where we could look down on the whole installation.

  Ernie's first observation was that it looked like a marijuana farm. We saw three long drying sheds and a good-sized cabin nearby that could have functioned as both a cookhouse and a bunkhouse. We didn't see any smoke coming from the chimney. Next to the cabin was a covered area for parking vehicles, but no vehicles were present, except an old VW van parked nearby, but it had a broken window and two flat tires, and it looked like it hadn't been washed since the first flower children had parked it here. Whatever color it might have started out as would only be determined at this point by either an archaeologist or a metallurgist.