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Perhaps they were. On her last trip to the thirtieth century Bernice had been far too busy running for cover to notice details like that.

'An exaggerated sexual innuendo,' said Roz. 'What kind of a cocktail is that?'

'I just made it up,' said Bernice. 'God knows what we'll get.'

What they got was two tall glasses swooping over the dunes on the back of a self-propelled tray to make a perfect landing on the table. The drinks were a cloudy orange shot through with streaks of vermilion. Moisture started condensing on the glasses as soon as they stopped moving.

One of them had a small paper parasol stuck in the top.

'That one's yours, I think,' said Bernice, taking the other drink. It was wonderfully cool against her palm. Something grey floated near the top of the glass; it was the extra mushroom.

There was a waterfall somewhere inland; the Doctor could smell it. If he concentrated he could just hear a low rumbling to the south. A big one then, larger than The Smoke That Thunders on the Zambezi and big enough to cast its spray as far as the coast and create a sub-tropical microclimate around the cove. The short stretch of beach was a dazzling white, enclosed by rocky promontories on both sides and by low forested hills on the other. The trees were tropical varieties, narrow-trunked with spreading crowns of broad emerald leaves. Brightly coloured blooms nestled at their roots and ran in streamers along the symbiotic vines that linked tree with tree. It was an isolated place and judging from the scantness of the path he'd traversed to get here, rarely visited. Just what the Doctor ordered in fact.

The Doctor waited just inside the tree-line, confident that the sharp contrast between shady forest and the dazzling sand would conceal him. Well, moderately confident anyway.

She was standing so still he didn't see her at first. Hip-deep in the water, the swell of the waves lapping around her waist and thighs, she had a spear in her right hand, poised motionless above her head. Some kind of pale wood, bamboo, guessed the Doctor, with a fire-hardened tip.

Her left arm was held slightly behind her body, elbow bent for balance, fingers spread as delicately as any pianist. The woman was thirty metres away; could she throw such a crude weapon that far? Probably not, but would you want to bet your life on it? Luckily for him she was facing out to sea, although this was probably not so lucky for the fish. Sunlight glittered off the water that beaded her head and back. The spear didn't so much as tremble, held in perfect balance, perfect stillness.

He remembered her dancing with the soldiers in the street outside M. Thierry's house in Paris.

The flowing interplay of muscle over bone and under skin. A macabre Blue Danube waltz choreographed for a single diva and four expendable extras.

Corpse de ballet, thought the Doctor.

There was a whisper of displaced air and aM!xitsa the drone was beside him. The machine's external fields were flush with its ellipsoid body, showing a dappled pattern of green and brown.

Joke jungle camouflage. A small hologram projected from the drone's nose, two dark dots above a horizontal line against an orange background. A human expression pared down to an absolute abstract: aM!xitsa's face ikon.

'Doctor,' said aM!xitsa, 'does God know you're here?'

'I told it last night.'

'That should give it something to think about.'

The Doctor nodded towards the figure in the water. 'How is she?'

'That's difficult to say,' said aM!xitsa. 'She catches fish and eats them, sometimes she even cooks them first.'

'High protein diet. She's building up her reserves.'

'She eats other stuff as well,' said the drone. 'Fruits, berries, leaves. Occasionally soil as well, about a hundred grammes a week.'

'Good to see she's getting all the food groups then.'

'She's built a hut on the other side of the cove, three metres back from the tree-line. Made it out of sun-dried mud-bricks.'

'She is an engineer.'

'The first one was washed away in a rain storm.'

'That's the trouble with mud as a building material.'