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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 Lady Forrester the socialite. Of course it could always be that the Forrester children did their school work here. She felt a twinge of envy; she would have loved to spend her school days among so much history.

She stepped over to the last table and noticed the painting for the first time. A wide canvas mounted in a gap between the shelves made by a twenty-eighth century secretaire. A portrait in soluble polymers. Two teenage girls against an impossible sweep of Ionian landscape.

37

If the background was fanciful, Genevieve judged that the figures were painted from life. One, on the left, was unmistakably the Baroness, dressed in the same costume of red blankets and jewellery as she wore that evening. Only younger, thirty, maybe thirty-five years younger. A teenage girl then. In her right hand she held the Forrester standard. The second figure, another young woman, clearly related to the Baroness, a sister – but no sister was listed among the Forrester titles.

Her features not exactly plain but somehow severe. Whereas the young Lady Forrester stared upward and out of the painting in the prescribed romantic manner, the other seemed preoccupied, not so much resentful of the whole process, more uncaring. She thinks she has better things she could be doing, thought Genevieve.

‘Hello,’ said a voice behind her. ‘What are you doing here?’

Genevieve started guiltily and turned. She found herself looking down at a young girl, six or seven years old, with black eyes and an unmistakably flat aristocratic nose. An echo of the girls in the portrait. She was flanked by two kinderbots, one shaped like a rabbit, the other a matt black spider.

‘I was looking at this painting,’ said Genevieve. ‘My name is Genevieve. What’s yours?’

The girl squinted suspiciously at Genevieve. A red blanket was wound around her waist as a skirt and knotted at the hip; bracelets hung on her ankles and wrists. There was a wiry strength about her. Not an easy kid to handle, thought Genevieve.

‘I’m Thandiwe,’ said the girl. The Baroness’s youngest daughter then. She indicated the kinderbots. ‘And this is Mr Fact and Mr Fiction.’

Personalized education bots, expensive, more expensive still because they were probably augmented to act as bodyguards. Mr Fiction, the rabbit, would be the more dangerous because it was cuddly.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Genevieve. She reached out to shake Thandiwe’s hand. Mr Fiction’s glossy brown eyes swivelled to track the movement. The girl shook hands solemnly.

‘You