Daeman shouted a final time, slid across a hard floor, bounced off an even harder wall, then ricocheted to the ceiling and back to the floor. Then he saw only blackness.

He was falling.

Daeman jerked to consciousness as his body and brain told him he was tumbling, falling. From the chair? To the Earth? He opened his mouth to scream again but closed it as he realized that he was floating in midair with Savi holding one of his arms and Harman the other.

Floating? Falling! He writhed and wriggled, but Savi and Harman—who were also floating in the white room—tumbled in the air with him, still holding him by the arms.

“It’s all right,” said Savi. “We’re in zero-g.”

“In what?” gasped Daeman.

“Zero gravity. No weight. Here, put this on.” She handed him one of the crawler’s osmosis masks. Someone had already pulled his thermskin cowl over his face and the smartsuit had extended its gloves over his hands. Now Daeman struggled in confusion, but the old woman and the older man tugged the clear osmosis mask into place over his nose and mouth.

“It’s meant as an emergency rebreather in case of fire or toxic gases,” said Savi. “But it’ll work in vacuum for a few hours.”

“Vacuum?” repeated Daeman.

“The posts’ city has lost gravity and a lot of its air,” said Harman. “We’ve already been through the wall while you were unconscious. There’s enough air to swim through, but not quite thick enough to breathe.”

Enough air to swim through? Already been through the wall? thought Daeman through his headache. They’re both crazy now. “How do you lose gravity?” he said aloud.

“I think they used forcefields to give them some gravity on this asteroid,” said Savi. “This rock isn’t big enough to generate much of its own, and the city inside shows some signs of being oriented toward the ground.”

Daeman didn’t ask what an asteroid was. He didn’t particularly care. “Can we get back down?” he said, but immediately added, “I’m not sitting on one of those chairs again.”

Savi’s smile was visible through her osmosis mask. She’d taken off her outer clothing to let her thermskin work more efficiently—she was wearing a peach color—and the suit, no thicker than a coat of paint, showed how scrawny and bony the old woman really was. Harman was also wearing only his blue thermskin. Daeman looked down and realized they’d stripped him of his real clothes so that his green thermskin showed how pudgy he was. With the thermskin and osmosis mask in place, Daeman heard the others’ voices through his cowl earpatches, and heard the slight echo of his own voice rasping in the built-in microphones.

“Those chairs aren’t going anywhere for a while,” said Savi. She nodded toward where bits of the broken chairs and the red cushions floated.

“I can’t believe that the posts traveled regularly to the rings on those things,” said Harman. The slight quaver in the older man’s voice let Daeman know that he wasn’t the only one who had hated that ride.

“Maybe they were all roller-coaster fans,” said Savi.

“What’s a . . .” began Daeman.

“Never mind,” said the old woman. She lifted the backpack she’d had on her lap during the whole ride up and said, “Ready to go through the wall and meet the posts?”

Going through the wall wasn’t hard at all. Passing through it felt to Daeman like pushing through some sort of yielding membrane, or perhaps like swimming through a warm waterfall.

Swimming. In air. Even after thirty minutes of doing it, it felt passing strange to Daeman. At first he flailed around with both arms and legs kicking almost at random, the antics moving him hardly at all and invariably sending him tumbling head over heels, but then he learned the trick of kicking off from one solid object to the next, even for distances of a hundred feet or more, using his legs to propel him and his cupped palms to make slight midcourse corrections.

All of the buildings seemed connected through their interiors, and what looked like bright internal lighting as they’d approached turned out to be an illusion. The windows glowed warmly, but it was the windows that were emitting the light. The vast interiors—the first space they entered after emerging from the white wall was three or four hundred feet across and at least a thousand feet high, with open terraces rising on three sides of the columnar space—were all dimly lighted by the orange glow from the distant wall windows, giving Daeman a sense of moving deep underwater. To add to that illusion of being underwater, various untended plants had grown forty and fifty feet high and were swaying to the slight breezes like tall stands of kelp.

Daeman could feel the thinness of the atmosphere as he tried to swim through what was left of the air. And while the thermskin covered all exposed skin and conserved all of his body heat, he could still sense the freezing cold beyond the molecular layer. He could see its effects as well, since the inner panels of glass were covered by a thin film of ice and occasional clusters of free-floating ice crystals caught the light like dust in shafts of cathedral light.

They came across the first bodies after only five minutes of kicking and swimming through the connected asteroid buildings.

The surface below had been covered with grass, terrestrial plants, trees, plants and flowers which Daeman had never seen on earth, but all of these had died except for the swaying kelp towers. While the surface had been parklike, open balconies on metal columns and dining and gathering areas festooned on walls and window surfaces showed how small the forcefield gravity must have been. The post-humans must have been able to push off from the “ground” and soar a hundred or more vertical feet before needing another open platform or aerial stepping-stone to push again. Many of these platforms still held hoarfrosted tables, overturned chairs, bulbous couches, and freestanding tapestries.

And bodies.

Savi kicked her way up to a terrace almost a hundred feet across. At one time it obviously stood beside and looked down on a thin waterfall tumbling from a balcony four or five hundred feet higher on the permcrete wall, but now the waterfall was frozen into a fragile latticework of ice and the eating area held only floating bodies.

Female bodies. All female, although the gray objects looked more like leathery mummies than anything either male or female.

There was little decomposition as such, but the effects of extreme cold and decreasing air pressure had freeze-dried the corpses over years or decades or centuries. When Daeman floated closer to the first cluster of bodies—all free-floating in the zero-g, but tangled in the mesh of what had once been some sort of decorative net between the dining area and the waterfall—he decided it had been centuries, not just decades, since these women had breathed and walked and flown in what Savi said had probably been one-tenth gravity and laughed and done whatever else post-humans had done before . . . before what? The women’s eyes were still intact, although frozen and clouded white in the gray leathery faces, and Daeman looked into the milky stares of the half dozen or so of the bodies as if there might be some answer there. When none was forthcoming, he cleared his throat and said into his osmosis mask microphone, “What do you think killed them?”

“I was wondering the same thing,” said Harman, floating near a separate cluster of bodies. The blue of his suit was almost shocking in the dim, funereal light and set against the gray skin of the corpses. “Sudden depressurization?”

“No,” said Savi. Her face was only inches from the face of one of the dead women. “There’s no hemorrhaging behind the eyes or signs of asphyxia or burst eardrums the way there would be if there had been a cataclysmic loss of atmosphere. And look at this.”