~ I ~ The proposal started as a document and became, over three weeks, something considerably more structured than Wena had initially planned. She had begun with a simple premise: the Mowla Archive needed materials that existed off-world. Kiswi's pre-evacuation botanical records, preserved in the settlements and partially recovered during the expedition, were the obvious starting point. Three centuries of Swambazi portal monitoring data, which Yazari had indicated could be shared, was the second. These were academic and cultural materials. They were not physical crossings. Routing the access question through the archive rather than through field visits or tourism sidestepped the governance gap that nobody had officially resolved. Quarren wrote the feral studies component over two evenings. He wrote about what the feral studies program specifically needed from off-world sources, why those materials could not be replicated from existing Silvanian records, and what the precedent of archive access rather than physical access would mean for similar programs in future. Raskon contributed the Cygnus Prime section last, and sent it without comment. Wena sent the proposal to the Guild, the Bakiswi council, the Swambazi contact registry, and Vethran, who had more working knowledge of the portal network's actual governance status than anyone else currently on Pansilva. While it was in transit, Veverka asked if she could take some students to Kigorith.
~ II ~ She came across the Pica on a Thursday for dinner, as she always did, and raised it at the table directly. "The students should see it," she said. "Not go through it yet. Just see it." "The governance question," Jukrit said. "Is about going through," Veverka said. "We are not going through. We are standing in a cave on Kigorith and looking at something that has been there for three thousand years. There is no governance question about looking." Jukrit looked at Noraxia. "She's right," Noraxia said. "Of course I am," Veverka said. "I want to take four students. Seni. The feral studies group; that means the cat, Broven the badger, and one other. Harvet's team is there and can receive us. We go, we look, we come back." "Who flies them?" Jukrit said. Noraxia looked at him. "Yes," he said. "All right." They went the following week, on a late winter day when the sky was clear and the cold was manageable. Noraxia flew Veverka and two of the students. The other two traveled with Jukrit by ground transport and arrived at the Kigorith survey camp an hour after the flyers, which gave Harvet time to prepare the descent and give Veverka time to look at the survey camp's updated instrumentation and ask Harvet twelve questions that took him forty minutes to answer.
~ III ~ Broven the badger had been turned away by the Guild twice before the Riverside Academy opened its doors. He was sixty-one years old. He had been a working herbalist for thirty years, accumulating knowledge through practice rather than certification, and the Guild's assessment had been that his methods were insufficiently documented and his theoretical framework was non-standard. Both assessments were accurate. Neither captured anything essential about him. He descended into the cave system without comment. He noted the crystalids in the upper chamber with attentiveness. "They're listening," he said. "To what?" Jukrit said. "The formation," Broven said. "I can feel it. Can't you?" Jukrit put his hand to the cave wall. The ambientite warmth was there, as always. "Yes," he said. "You feel it as a healer?" "I feel it as someone who has been putting his hands on living things for thirty years," Broven said. "I don't have a category for it. It's not in any of my references. It's something else." "Yes," Jukrit said. "That's about right." They went down.
~ IV ~ The feral cat's name, in the symbol interface notation he used, was a glyph that the handler had transliterated as Miv. He was a large silver tabby who navigated the cave system with efficiency. He stopped at the entrance to the lower chamber. His handler, a young rabbit furfolk named Essa who had been accompanying Miv for three years, stopped beside him. "He's reading it," Essa said. "Give him a moment." They gave him a moment. He stood at the chamber entrance with his tail low and his ears forward. Then he walked in. He went directly to the portal. Not to the symbol stations. Not to the ambientite walls. To the portal itself, which he sat in front of and stared at. "What does he make of it?" Veverka asked. Essa watched Miv's ears. "He's not alarmed," she said. "He's interested. He wants to know what it is." "So does everyone," Broven said. Miv sat in front of the portal for ten minutes. He did not move. The portal was warm and the chamber was quiet. Everyone else in the chamber was watching a feral cat decide what a three-thousand-year-old interplanetary transit structure meant to him. Then he turned around and went to the symbol station and typed something. Essa read it. She looked at Veverka. "He says it smells like outside," she said. "But the outside is very far away."
~ V ~ Seni was Aldren's daughter, and she had a perceptual ability that Veverka had known about since before the academy opened. She perceived things in layers. Not metaphorically. She had, since childhood, registered the world as having a depth that others didn't mention. She had been in the lower chamber for four minutes before she sat down on the cave floor. Not in distress. Veverka came and sat beside her. "Tell me," Veverka said. "It's very loud," Seni said. "Not in the sound sense. In the other sense." "What is it saying?" "I don't know yet." She was quiet. "It has been here for a very long time. It remembers everything that came through it. I don't know if remembers is the right word. It holds the record." Veverka looked at the portal. "Like the formation," she said. "Like the formation," Seni agreed. "But older. And... more active. The formation holds what has been. This is also pointing toward what could be." She sat with it for another five minutes. Then she stood up. "I'd like to come back," she said. "With more time." "Yes," Veverka said. "I think that's the right answer." Broven, who had been listening from across the chamber, looked at Seni. "Non-standard theoretical framework," he said, very quietly. Seni looked at him. "The Guild turned me away twice for it," he said. "I consider it a compliment now."
~ VI ~ The journey back to Riverside Market took place mostly in silence. Veverka flew back with Noraxia. She sat between Noraxia's wings in the carrier that Khari had built, wrapped against the cold, and looked at Pansilva's winter landscape below with satisfaction. Broven was quiet on the ground journey. Near Riverside Market he said: "The feral cat understood it faster than I did." "Miv has different tools," Jukrit said. "Yes," Broven said. "That's what I'm thinking about." He said nothing else until they reached the town. Essa filed Miv's response to the portal in the academy's documentation records that evening. The first recorded feral-student response to a quantum-anchored interplanetary structure, noted as: subject identified portal as sensory phenomenon before identifying it as technological artifact. Handler notes: subject appeared to perceive the portal as a place rather than an object. Wena read this the following morning and added it as an appendix to the proposal.
~ VII ~ The first responses to the proposal came within the week. The Bakiswi council responded first and positively, which was not surprising given that the proposal's primary materials category was the recovery of Bakiswi cultural records. They had two amendments. Both were reasonable and Wena incorporated them within a day. Vethran responded personally rather than officially, which told Jukrit that the governance question was still genuinely unresolved. His response said: the proposal's framing is the correct one. Materials transfer does not require physical crossing and therefore does not engage the access question. I am recommending the Guild accept it on those grounds. The Guild took ten days. Their response was positive with conditions. The conditions were detailed and some of them were unnecessary. Wena went through them methodically, reducing them from eleven to four in a counter-proposal that she sent back the same afternoon. Yazari's response came last, routed through the Swambazi contact registry. It was brief: the proposal is well-constructed. The three centuries of monitoring data will be prepared for transfer. We appreciate the archive framing. It is the correct precedent to establish. She added a postscript: I understand that a feral student perceived the portal as a place rather than an object. This is consistent with what the Swambazi have observed. We would welcome the documentation when it is published. Wena read this to Quarren in their lodgings across town. He wrote: send it to her before publishing. She has earned that. Wena sent it that evening.
~ VIII ~ Late winter loosened its grip on Riverside Market incrementally. The Pica got fractionally louder at its edges as the ice thinned. Veverka crossed the river on a Thursday for dinner and told the table that Seni had asked to return to Kigorith. That she had specific questions she wanted to bring back to the portal. That she had been developing a notation system for what she perceived that was not yet communicable to anyone else but was becoming more precise. "She's twenty-two years younger than the Guild thinks she should be to be doing this kind of work," Veverka said. "She's also twenty-two years younger than I was when I understood what I was doing. Neither of those facts is a problem." Broven had returned to his herbalist practice during the week but had been at the academy on both symbol-interface mornings. He and Miv had been observed in the feral studies room, which had not been planned, sitting on opposite sides of a low table with an interface between them. What they were doing with the interface was unclear. Quarren, who had come in and assessed the situation, had left them to it. Jukrit walked home from the academy that evening along the Pica's bank. The river was beginning to sound like itself again — not winter-muffled but present, audible, moving. The proposal was in place. The archive would receive its first off-world materials before spring. Seni would go back to the portal with her questions. Miv and Broven were working something out that was not anticipated. The door in the cave at Kigorith was not open. It did not need to be open to be doing its work.
Veverka is trying to make the portal in Kigorith a thing for the academy. Is there any bureaucratic red tape preventing this? Is the portal just an object, or a place in itself?
