Paperwork, however, was the thing he despised most.
He’d almost rather have returned to academia.
The Neo Edo’s executive office, larger than some modern, up-time homes, was one of the features of his current career that made it tolerable. His office boasted a video wall with panoramic real-time views of the Commons and equally panoramic taped views of multiple down-time vistas. A wet bar stocked with illegal bottles of liquid ambrosia (which both Kit and his predecessor, the builder of Neo Edo, had brought back up time) was available any time the job grew too hairy.
Priceless paintings and art treasures rescued from palaces, destroyed by the Onin Wars in fifteenth century Kyoto graced Kit’s office, which also boasted pristine tatami rice mats on the floor and the clean, uncluttered look of sliding paper-screen walls and delicately carved woodwork.
The office’s best feature, however, was a recessed light well which cast realistic-looking “daylight” over a miniature Japanese dry-landscape garden. The serene arrangement of raked white sand, upright stones, and elegantly clipped topiary which filled an entire corner of the office rested the eyes and soothed the soul.
It was Kit’s salvation on paperwork days. He would periodically sit back in his chair, nurse a good bourbon, and contemplate the symbolic “islands” the rock formations represented, floating in their withered “sea” of sand. It gave Kit intense pleasure to symbolically consign the drafters of the requisite government forms to a long life marooned on one of those miniature desert islands, without hope of rescue.