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amethyst were plaited into black hair, pulled back to accentuate high cheekbones. A cloak, no, a blanket made of some non-synthetic material, was pinned at the shoulder with the azure and blood-red sigil of her family.
    35
    ‘My Lady.’ Genevieve curtsied politely. ‘My Lord Walid sends his apologies but he is detained by a meeting of the Imperial Council. He promises faithfully that he will make all efforts to arrive before the festivities conclude.’
    The Baroness laughed. ‘Politics, eh?’ she said. ‘Who needs it?’
    Genevieve felt herself flush. She wasn’t sure how to answer.
    ‘The Empire must be governed –’
    ‘Of course it must,’ said Lady Forrester. ‘Let’s just be thankful that people like Walid are willing to do it. Now, there are people I want you to meet.’
    She linked arms with Genevieve, who realized that what she’d taken for sleeves were in fact an interlocking mass of blue and white bracelets.
    Genevieve found herself being gently but firmly drawn into the social whirl, the chatter about clothes and who’d been promoted or demoted and the state of the Empress’s health. ‘What do you think of the palace?’ asked her hostess.
    ‘It’s beautiful,’ said Genevieve.
    ‘Built by the fifth Baron in 2870,’ said Lady Forrester,
    ‘although each of us have added to it in our time. I’m particularly proud of the animals. We created them, you know. Terran species from before the Dalek invasion. Worked them up from a genebank that one of my ancestors salted away for a rainy day.
    Amazing what you can turn up in the family vault, isn’t it?’
    ‘Amazing,’ said Genevieve.
    A library: a Centcomp search engine or discrete database. A smart system to allow the systematic access of information via puterspace. A technology refined over a millennium until a single human being, providing they had the proper funds and clearance, could learn anything known by the human race.
    Genevieve was one of the few members of her generation who knew a library could be something else as well. That it could be a room full of physical information storage, books, disks, cubes.
    Information you could touch with your hand.
    Like the library she found in the palace at Kibero. A narrow, high-ceilinged room to the south of the main hall. A row of three 36
    identical rosewood federation tables running down its centre, shelves lining the walls from floor to ceiling.
    Genevieve reached out and let her fingertips brush against the lucite dust covers of the nearest books, marvelling at the antiquity of some of them. There was a smell of paper dust and ancient wood. On Tara, the door to her father’s library was always locked and screened, forbidden to strangers and curious children. The books in rigid order: subject, author, title. Pinned to the shelves behind screens of industrial diamond. Part of the inviolate heritage of the Gwalchmai family, like the blue flags and berets hung in the great hall, icons and relics to be displayed but never touched.
    In the library at Kibero the books were clearly in use. There was a pile on the nearest table, mostly poetry: Sassoon, Naruda, Baldrick’s Listen to the Song I Sing . A Penguin edition of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart lay on top of a pile of optical discs, yellowing pages held open by an empty disc cover.
    A set of sleeve notes were propped up against the antique fiche viewer embedded in the table top – for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf .
    The next table seemed devoted to history. The viewer displayed the title page of Greed Incorporated: The Rise of the Space Corporations by M. Ashe. There were a scatter of titles dealing with the twenty-sixth century that Genevieve recognized from school, the Cyber wars, Imperium Draco, the final defeat of the Daleks. And more poetry but related, the Fitzgerald translation of The Lament of the Non-Operational – a forbidden text.
    Genevieve frowned. It all seemed inconsistent with her image of