Futures Past by Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois

Author:Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois [Dann, Jack & Dozois, Gardner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Alternative History, Fiction, short stories, General
ISBN: 9780441014545
Google: EzxtiKSxlDgC
Amazon: 0441014542
Publisher: Ace
Published: 2006-10-30T05:00:00+00:00

THE PSYCHIATRIST SEEMED like a nice enough guy. We talked a few minutes about the medical stuff Doc Adams had sent over; work, the shock, what Mo had told the doc.

“Your daughter seems to think you’re upset about your environment. Can you tell me why she thinks that?”

“I think she means to say I told her this was not the world I was born in and have lived in for fifty-six years,” I said. He didn’t write anything down in his pad.

“It’s all different,” I said. He nodded.

“Since the other morning, everything I’ve known all my life doesn’t add up. The wrong people have been elected to office. History is different. Not just the politics-battles-wars stuff, butt also social history, culture. There’s a book of social history by a guy named Furnas. I haven’t looked, but I bet that’s all different, too. I’ll get it out of the library today. If it’s there. If there’s a guy named Fumas anymore.”

I told him some of the things that were changed just in two days’ worth. I told him it—some of it anyway—was fascinating, but I’m sure I’ll find scary stuff sooner or later. I’d have to learn to live with it, go with the flow.

“What do you think happened?” he asked.

“What is this, The Sopranos?”

“Beg pardon?” he asked.

“Oh. Oh. You’d like it. It’s a TV show about a Mafia guy who, among other things, goes to a shrink—a lady shrink. It’s on HBO.”

“HBO?”

“Sorry. A cable network.”

He wrote three things down on his pad.

“Look. Where I come from … I know that sounds weird. In Lindner’s book …”

“Lindner?”

“Lindner. The Fifty-Minute Hour. Best-seller. 1950s.”

“I take it by the title it was about psychiatry. And a bestseller?”

“Let me start over. He wrote the book they took the title Rebel Without A Cause from—but that had nothing to do with the movie …”

He was writing stuff down now, fast.

“It’s getting deeper and deeper, isn’t it?” I asked. “Go on. Please.”

“Lindner had a patient who was a guy who thought he lived on a far planet in an advanced civilization—star-spanning galaxy-wide stuff. Twenty years before Star Wars. Anyway …

He wrote down two words without taking his eyes off me. “In my world,” I said, very slowly and carefully, looking directly at him, “there was a movie called Star Wars in 1977 that changed the way business was done in Hollywood. “Okay,” he said.

“This is not getting us anywhere!” I said.

And then he came out with the most heartening timing I’d heard in two days. He said, “What do you mean we, kemo sabe?”

Well, we laughed and laughed, and then I tried to tell him, really tell him, what I thought I knew.

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