>It looks like the sort is happening before the val conversion because negative numbers aren't at the top. Is there anything I can do in the SQL statement to make this work correctly?

Works fine for me:

CREATE CURSOR temp1 (cField c(10))
APPEND BLANK 
REPLACE cField WITH '3'
APPEND BLANK 
REPLACE cField WITH '2'
APPEND BLANK 
REPLACE cField WITH '-1'
APPEND BLANK 
REPLACE cField WITH '9'
SELECT VAL(cfield) as xyz FROM temp1 ORDER BY xyz

Shows, -1, 2, 3, 9 for me.