"David Gerrold - [SS] The Equally Strange Reappearance of David Gerrold" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gerrold David)

something. But it was mostly speculation.
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