Endworlds - Nicholas Read [4]
He smiled as he took the paper and appraised it with the same eye that had valued many internationally known works of art in his private collection. “Good form, good color. Maybe they’ll hang it in the Louvre.”
Paige giggled with delight. Her father always made her feel important.
“Daddy you are my air!” she said brightly.
“And you take my breath away,” was the appropriate response.
It was a phrase Paige had made up a couple of years ago. She had told him seriously one morning that ‘I love you’ was special, and not to be shared in public with strangers. This is what she’d come up with as an alternative. He marveled at how one so young could so perfectly capture how he felt about her. She was his world.
“You girls have fun now. And don’t break the airplane.”
Making no promises, she darted back to the rear of the cabin. He followed her with his eyes until the strain on his neck forced him to turn away. Away, and back to the work he had spread out before him.
Though it was hard to concentrate on business when she was around he could not resist bringing her along on his frequent business trips whenever he could. He was away from home so much that if he didn’t take her with him he would hardly see her at all. He didn’t want to concentrate on work when she was around. She was his anchor, his antidote, the effervescence that put life into his existence. After a long day of executive meetings, poring over reports and statistics, trying to divine what governments and corporations wanted and devising the best and most cost-effective way to sell it to them, he liked nothing better than to come home, share a staff-cooked meal, and help her with her schoolwork.
And horsey. Even a billionaire could be good at horsey.
Watching her caused a smile to crack the set expression that usually dominated his visage. He waved. She waved back and turned toward Emily on her left. Both giggled anew. Then Alyssa sprang up with a blanket over her head and all three girls dropped out of sight.
Settling back in his seat, he returned to his work. He wondered what it must be like to be that young, that innocent, that ten. He didn’t remember. He didn’t remember much of anything, really, before being found by traders from the Vanavara trading post. Half dead from starvation, half frozen from the Siberian cold, he had been nursed back to health by the locals, his name found in a hand-scrawled slip of paper in his pocket.
In his delirium he had babbled in a strange language. Or perhaps several. His deeply religious rescuers believed that he had been speaking tongues.
Whatever he had been speaking, in the course of his gradual convalescence he had demonstrated a remarkable facility for languages, rapidly acquiring Russian, Mandarin, and lastly English. Since he was obviously neither Russian nor Chinese, the local authorities presumed he had somehow wandered into their territory from the nearby District of Alaska. A lost hunter perhaps, or an overly ambitious gold prospector from Nome.
Returned home by ship to Ketchikan and then sent down to Seattle, it was assumed that like so many prospectors the benumbed stranger had lost everything.
He spent some time recovering in a veteran’s hospice with a spare cot, then worked for food and board by sweeping streets.
Marveling one day at one of the new adding machines that held pride of place in the administration office where he redeemed his vouchers, he was drawn to the round keys and ink ribbon that replaced so much manual accounting drudgery. People called it a computer. He called it a wonder, and went to work for the American Arithmometer Corporation, the company that manufactured it, later called Burroughs1.
Decades of time, hard work, and a piercing brilliance led him from the sales room to the Boardroom, eventually becoming head of a division, and then CEO of its 1986 high-tech spin-off, Burroughs Labs.
Though he had acquired money, power, and the notoriety that