K. A. Bedford Quotes

Spider!" Mr. Patel said, coming up to him, taking his hand, pumping it hard. "You're a hard man to find!"
"Evidently not hard enough.

Spider had to keep that firmly in his mind. It was a lesson he had learned on the job: things are not always as they seem. Sometimes, even most times, they are far stranger than you’d imagine, and most likely more perverse than you’d care to consider.

The future was not what it used to be.

It was hard to just sit and relax. Everyone he saw somehow looked suspicious, especially all those people who appeared perfectly innocuous: nobody who looked that innocuous could be anything but guilty, Spider thought.

It was a hard thing to contemplate, even harder to accept, the inevitable tide of technological progress, which even as it created careers for some, also destroyed careers for others.

He’d lived with a mad sculptress for long enough that he knew (believed, really) that much of what passed for art these days was bullshit, all naked emperors and nobody commenting on it. In any case, as soon as he registered, “ah, sculpture”, he lost interest and looked away.

So what is this Final Secret? Any Ideas?" Spider asked, trying to sound reasonable.
"We don't know. We just don't know. All we know is what the Vores have communicated to us so far."
"Right," Spider said, nodding, hating every moment of this nonsense. "And when you say 'we' and 'us', what you really mean is 'you', yes?"
"They communicate through a living channel, yes, and that is, of course, me.

And in that moment, Spider noticed a strange thing. He found to his surprise that he did not dislike Mr. Patel. Which, obviously, was a long way from liking the man, but who knew? Maybe that would come in time.

“Spider, please, sit. I will explain everything.”
“You’ll explain everything. Fine. Great!” Spider said, but inside, in his mind, he was thinking, Bag and cat have now parted company.

The coffee, when he tried it, was strong almost to the point of being unbearable, but not quite. In short, it was divine.

He felt a trickle of cold fear in the depths of his belly, a dread that he was going to get his wish.

The thing Spider hated about time machines was that people got them, thinking they could fix everything that had gone wrong in their lives. Thinking they could go back and make amends for things they wished they’d not done. Thinking they could save loved ones from terrible fates, or magically improve their love lives. Too many people thought of time machines as magical “Get out of Personal Responsibility Free” devices. In times past, if you did something rotten, or hurt someone you loved, or didn’t do so well with the ladies, you tried to learn from it, and maybe become a better person in the future. Now people who’d done those sorts of things—and worse—simply figured, Oh well, I’ll jump in my time machine, and fix it. Which was fine, but in ninety-eight percent of such cases, time machine operators succeeded only in making their situations worse.

The great majority of them came back a week later, complaining that it was all Spider’s fault. Yes, he thought, it was his fault. It was his fault for trying to help idiots.

You up for it, or am I going in again? Please note, by the way, there is only one correct answer to this question.

The bloody future," Spider muttered. "What's it ever done for us?