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He smiles at the woman. It is an ancient smile. He knows she knows.

He knows she will forget.

We get old. Our bodies tire. Replication errors occur within our DNA. The complicated chemical gavotte that maintains us starts to falter. The machine becomes eccentric. We stop dancing.

Roz sat down and wiped sweat off her face. Her feet started to hurt. She took some deep breaths to get her breathing back to normal. She felt good.

Bernice sat down beside her.

'Hey, girl,' said Bernice, 'I didn't know you had it in you.'

'Neither did I,' said Roz, 'and I was doing it.'

Kadiatu was still dancing. The other dancers were careful to give her plenty of room. Roz saw the Doctor watching the tall woman dance. His expression was soft, almost wistful. There was something Roz thought she should remember about him but the thoughts were quickly gone.

Bernice handed her a mug of hot mulled wine. The two women sat side by side in silence, sipping their drinks. Whynot hung in multiple crescents over its reflection in the harbour. Bernice reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a slim leather-bound notebook, her diary.

'The thoughts of Chairman Summerfield,' said Bernice obscurely. She took up her pen and scribbled two lines under the last entry. She read them over and, apparently satisfied with what she had written, snapped the little book closed. 'There,' she said. 'Another exciting chapter comes to a close.'

'How long have you been keeping that diary?' asked Roz.

'Since I was very young,' said Bernice. 'It helps me put things into perspective and it's useful when there's no one around you can talk to.'

'I don't know,' said Roz. 'Aren't you worried someone might read it?'

'That's a risk,' said Bernice. 'On the other hand it could form the basis of my bestselling autobiography when I'm old and decrepit and desperately short of cash.'

Roz wasn't convinced. Keeping a diary seemed a bit too risky to her, a bit too much like leaving evidence. More than one criminal had been caught because they couldn't resist the urge to get literary about their careers.

She wondered, suddenly, if a drone would keep a diary.

Kadiatu finally stopped dancing and keeled over at dawn. AM!xitsa caught her before she hit the ground and, lifting her in its invisible arms, carried her away towards the villa. As they floated past Bernice, she saw that the African woman's feet had been cut to ribbons by the stones of the beach. She wondered what it was like to be so caught up in the dance that you transcend pain. It was a well-known anthropological phenomenon amongst so-called 'primitive' peoples but she'd watched Roz, a city girl from the thirtieth century, join Kadiatu on the beach. They had worn the same expression of dreamy concentration as they danced, of rapture. Bernice felt a twinge of something that she suspected was envy. A pang of loss for a piece of the human experience she had somehow been denied. She poked at her jealousy, exploring it the way she would an unexpected crack in her teeth. Is there something missing? she asked herself. Am I really so incomplete? I told the Doctor I would leave him if he killed Kadiatu but I came damn near to killing her myself.

For a moment it had been as if she glimpsed the patterns that the Doctor always talked about, those amazing fractalized circles that spin through history. Seen, just for a half-remembered moment, the fragile weak spots where an individual really did make a difference in the wave front of linear time.

A handful of remote-drones came sliding out of the sky to pack up the entertainment modules and deliver vital supplies to die-hard partygoers with the munchies.

'You bastard.' She said it out loud, meaning the Doctor. 'You did that on purpose.' Making her responsible for the decision, forcing her to see the patterns. But that didn't make sense – risking a war with the people just to teach Bernice a lesson – highly unlikely. There was some other plan below that plan,