With a sudden access of vigor she twisted the handle of her scooter and hurried after the others.

Lieserl. Take it easy. You’re doing fine.

She looked up, tipping back her head. Already she was dropping out of the complex, exhilarating world of the convection region, with its immense turbulent cells, tangled flux tubes and booming p-waves. She stared upwards, allowing herself the luxury of nostalgia. The convective-zone cavern had come to seem almost homely, she realized.

Homely… at least compared to the regions she was going to enter now.

We’re still getting good telemetry, Lieserl.

“Good. I’m relieved.”

Lieserl, how are you feeling?

She laughed. With a mixture of exasperation and affection, she said, “I’ll feel better when you lose your ‘good telemetry’, Kevan, and I don’t have to listen to your dumb-ass questions any more.”

You’ll miss me when I’m gone.

“Actually,” Lieserl said, “that’s probably true. But I’m damned if I’m going to tell you so.”

Scholes laughed, his synthesized voice surprisingly unrealistic. You haven’t answered my question.

Her arms still outstretched, she looked down at her bare feet. “Actually, I feel a little like Christ. Dali’s Christ, perhaps, suspended in the air over an uncaring landscape.”

Yeah, Scholes said casually. My thought exactly.

Now she plunged through the last ghost-forms of convective cells. It was exactly like falling out of a cloud bank. The milky-white surface of the plasma sea was exposed beneath her; huge g-mode waves crawled across its surface, like thoughts traversing some huge mind.

Her rate of fall suddenly increased. It felt as if the bottom had dropped out of her stomach.

“Lethe,” she whispered.

Lieserl?

She found her chest tightening — and that was absurd, of course, because she had no chest. She struggled to speak. “I’m okay, Kevan. It’s just a little vertigo.”

Vertigo?

“Virtual vertigo. I feel like I’m falling. This illusion’s too damn good.”

Well, you are falling, Lieserl. Your speed’s increased, now you’re out of the convective stuff.

“I’m scared, Kevan.”

Take it easy. The telemetry is —

“Screw the telemetry. Just talk to me.”

He hesitated. You’re a hundred thousand miles beneath the photosphere. You’re close to the boundary of the radiative zone; the center of the Sun is another seven hundred thousand miles below you.

“Don’t look down,” she breathed.

Right. Don’t look down. Listen, you can be proud; that’s deeper than any probe we’ve dropped before.

Despite her fear, she couldn’t let that go. “So I’m a probe, now?”

Sorry. We’re looking at the new material squirting through the other end of your refrigerator-wormhole now. I can barely see the Interface for the science platforms clustered around it. It’s a great sight, Lieserl; we’ve universities from all over the System queuing up for observation time. The density of the gas around you is only about one percent of water’s. But it’s at a temperature of half a million degrees.

“Strong stuff.”

Angel tears, Lieserl…

The plasma sea was rushing up toward her, bland, devouring. Suddenly she was convinced that she, and her flimsy wormhole, were going to disappear into that well of fire with barely a spark. “Oh, Lethe!” She tucked her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around her lower legs, so that she was falling curled up in a fetal ball.

Lieserl, you’re not committed to this. If you want to pull out of there —

“No.” She closed her eyes and rested her forehead against her knees. “No, it’s all right. I’m sorry. I’m just not as tough as I think I am, sometimes.”

The wormhole is holding together. We think, after the redesign we’ve done, that you can penetrate at least the first few thousand miles of the radiative zone, without compromising the integrity of the wormhole. Maybe deeper; the temperature and pressure gradients are pretty small. But you know we didn’t advise this dive —

“I know it.” She opened her eyes and faced the looming sea once more. The fear was still huge, like a vice around her thinking. “Kevan, I’d never assemble the courage to go through this a second time. It’s now or never. I’ll even try to enjoy the ride.”

Stay with it, Lieserl.

“Yeah,” she growled. “And you stay with me — ”

Suddenly her fall was halted. It felt as if she had run into a wall of glass; her limbs spread-eagled against an invisible barrier and the breath was knocked out of her illusory lungs. Helpless, she was even thrown back up into the “air” a short distance; then her fall resumed, even more precipitately than before.

She screamed: “Kevan!”

We saw it, Lieserl. I’m still here; it’s okay. Everything’s nominal.

Nominal, she thought sourly. How comforting. “What in Lethe was that?”

You’re at the bottom of the convective layer. You should have been expecting something like that.

“Yes?” she snarled. “Well, maybe you should have damn well told me — yike!”

Again, that sudden, jarring arrest, followed by a disconcerting hurl into the air, as if she were an autumn leaf in the breeze.

Like snakes and bloody ladders, she thought.

You’re passing through the boundary layer between the radiative and connective zones, is all, Scholes said with studied calm. Below you is plasma; above you atomic gas — matter cool enough for electrons to stick to nuclei.

The photons emerging from the fusing core just bounce off the plasma, but they dump all their energy into the atomic gas. It’s the process that powers the connective zone, Lieserl. A process that drives connective founts bigger than worlds. So you shouldn’t be surprised if you encounter a little turbulence. In fact, out here we’re all interested by the fact that the boundary layer seems to be so thin…

We’re still tracking you, Lieserl; you shouldn’t be afraid. You’re through the turbulence now, aren’t you? You should be falling freely again.

“Yes. Yes, I am. So I’m in the sea, now?”

The sea?

“The plasma sea. The radiative zone.”

Yes.

“But — ”

Suddenly, almost without warning, the familiar skyscape of convection cells and flux tubes was misting from her sight, whiting out. There was whiteness above, before, below her; it was like being suspended inside some huge, chilling eggshell.

But what? What is it, Lieserl? What’s wrong?

For the first time she felt real panic creep around her mind.

“I can’t see, Kevan.”

Mark, rising through brightly lit air, looked down. He was nearing the top of the loading bay now. The base was a floor of glass far below him, with the spine and drive section ghostly forms beyond; people and ’bots criss-crossed the bay, hauling their cargo.

Mark tried to analyze his own impressions as they rose. For a moment he fought an irrational surge of vertigo: a feeling — despite the evidence of his eyes that he was in zero-gee — that if he tumbled from this scooter he would plummet to that floor of glass, far below. He concentrated on the environment close to him, the thick layer of warm, bright air all round him. But that made the glimpses of the spine and drive — the brutal limbs of the ship — seem unreal, as if the emptiness of space beyond the fragile walls of the dome was an illusion.

Mark felt uneasy. The ship was so huge, so complex — so convincing. After a few decades, it would be terribly easy to believe that this ship was a world, to forget that there was anything real, or significant, beyond its walls.

Now they were approaching the roof of the bay: the maintenance bulkhead. Mark drew level with Garry Uvarov, and they stared up at the mile-wide layer of engineering above them. The bulkhead was a tangle of pipes, ducts and cables, an inverted industrial landscape. There were even tree-roots, Mark saw. People and ’bots swarmed everywhere, working rapidly and apparently efficiently; even as Mark watched the bulkhead’s complex surface seemed to evolve, the ducts and tubes creeping across the surface like living things. It was a little like watching life spread through some forest of metal and plastic.