Cris rode the turbulent Magfield almost automatically. He stared at the neutrino fount, fascinated, almost forgetting his own peril. The fount was a tower, dark, unimaginably massive, thrusting out of the turbulent mass of the Quantum Sea. As it rose into Mantle Air, the viscous purple Sea-stuff crusted over, shattering, the fragments spiraling upward around the dense-packed flux lines of the Magfield.

Here was stuff from deep in the heart of the Star — deeper than any Bell had gone, deeper perhaps even than Hork's wooden ship would reach. Here was an expulsion of material from the immense, single nucleus that was the soul of the Star, from within the nebulous boundary between Sea and Core. The fount's material was hyperonic; each hyperon was a huge cluster of quarks far more massive than any ordinary nucleon, and the hyperons were bound together by quark exchanges into complex, fractal masses. But as the material spewed up through the throat of the Pole its structure was collapsing, unable to sustain itself in the lower-density regime of the Mantle. The quark bags were breaking apart, releasing a flood of energy, and reforming as showers of nucleons; and the free nucleons — protons and neutrons — were congealing rapidly into chunks of cooling nuclear matter.

That deadly hail was now lancing through the Mantle, and would soon come streaming upward around the City. And he felt the energy released by that huge wave of hyperonic decay as it surged upward, the neutrinos sleeting through his body, hot and needle-sharp, on their way to the emptiness above the Crust.

Now, even as he watched, the spiraling paths of the charged chunks of freezing Core-matter seemed to be distorting — flattening — as if the Magfield itself were changing, in response to the disaster.

Suddenly Cris understood.

The Magfield was changing. The irruption of this immense freight of charged material from the Core had disrupted the field; the Sea-fount was like an electrical current, unimaginably strong, passing through the heart of the Star's Magfield Pole, temporarily competing with the great magnetic engines at the Core of the Star itself. What he'd felt — the unexpected surges in the field — had been no more than distant echoes of that huge disturbance.

...But now another of those magnetic echoes hurtled up around him. This time his feet slipped from the board and he fell forward, crying out; the board slammed against his chest and thrust him upward toward the Crust. He clung to the board helplessly, his legs scrabbling across its smooth surface, as he rose faster than he could ever have Surfed. If he lost the board he was finished, he knew. His mind raced. Perhaps he would be thrown beyond the Crust, board and all! What then? Would his body collapse into cooling fragments in the emptiness beyond, just as the Core material froze in the Mantle?

As it happened, would he be aware?

But the upward surge subsided, as suddenly as it had come.