Suspicious, hostile, Lieserl allowed her mother to take her hand; but she made her fingers lie lifeless, cold in Phillida's warm grasp.

It was mid-morning now. The Sun's light flooded the garden; flowers -- white and yellow -- strained up towards the sky.

Lieserl looked around; the garden was empty. "What am I supposed to be seeing?"

Phillida, solemnly, pointed upwards.

Lieserl tilted back her head, shading her eyes to block out the light. The sky was a searing-blue dome, marked only by a high vapor trail and the lights of habitats.

"No." Gently, Phillida pulled Lieserl's hand down from her face, and, cupping her chin, tipped her face flowerlike towards the Sun.

The star's light seemed to fill her head. Dazzled, she dropped her eyes, stared at Phillida through a haze of blurred, streaked retinal images.

The Sun. Of course...

Kevan Scholes said, Damn it, Lieserl, you're going to have to respond properly. Things are difficult enough without--"

I know. I'm sorry. How are you feeling, anyway?"

Me? I'm fine. But that's hardly the point, is it? Now come on, Lieserl, the team here are getting on my back; let's run through the tests.

"You mean I'm not down here to enjoy myself?"

Scholes, speaking from his safe habitat far beyond the photosphere, didn't respond.

"Yeah. The tests. Okay, electromagnetic first." She adjusted her sensorium. "I'm plunged into darkness," she said drily. "There's very little free radiation at any frequency -- perhaps an X-ray glow from the photosphere; it looks a little like a late evening sky. And--"

We know the systems are functioning. I need to know what you see, what you feel.

"What I feel?"

She spread her arms and sailed backwards through the "air" of the cavern. The huge convective cells buffeted and merged like living things, whales in this insubstantial sea of gas.

"I see convection fountains," she said. "A cave full of them."

She rolled over onto her belly, so that she was gliding face down, surveying the plasma sea below her. She opened her eyes, changing her mode of perception. The convective honeycomb faded into the background of her senses, and the magnetic flux tubes came into prominence, solidifying out of the air; beyond them the convective pattern was a sketchy framework, overlaid. The tubes were each a hundred yards broad, channels cutting through the air; they were thousands of miles long, and they filled the air around her, all the way down to the plasma sea.

Lieserl dipped into a tube; she felt the tingle of enhanced magnetic strength. Its walls rushed past her, curving gracefully. "It's wonderful," she said. "I'm inside a flux tube. It's an immense tunnel; it's like a fairground ride. I could follow this path all the way round the Sun."