71st Concordance

Overview

The 71st Concordance is a governing instrument of the Tower, promulgated in the winter following the partial collapse of the Eastern Stairwell and ratified, in a form now disputed, by the Librarians' assembly on the seventh gallery of a floor whose number was later vacated. It is chiefly remembered not for its own content but for the manner of its passage: the 71st was superseded before the ink of its seal was dry, by the 72nd, and the interval between the two has never been agreed. The 72nd Concordance is conventionally held to bear the earlier seal; the 71st the earlier signature. Concordance Amendment Tracking records the overlap as "irreducible."

The 71st comprises four chapters and an unnumbered preamble. Of these, only Chapter Two — concerning the classification of stairwells as either ascending or declining — has remained in continuous force, surviving its own Concordance's supersession and, on one reading, the supersession that preceded it.

Circumstances of passage

The Eastern Stairwell collapsed on the evening of a day the record gives only as "the third of the heavy frost." The collapse was not total; the stairwell continued to ascend for eleven floors beyond the break, which the Metrological Accord had previously defined as impossible, and this impossibility, rather than the collapse itself, was what the assembly was convened to address. The compiler assigned to the project, Sub-Librarian Vell, later of the Concordance Reconciliation desk, was instructed to reconcile the stairwell's behaviour with the Accord. He produced the 71st Concordance in its place, on the grounds that the Accord was "unreconcilable and the stairwell is not."

This substitution — a document about stairwell classification where a document about measurement was expected — was accepted without recorded objection. It is cited in Concordance Findings as the clearest instance of a drafting substitution passing unnoticed through three stages of review.

Chapter Two and the descending clause

Chapter Two establishes that a stairwell is ascending if, upon entering it in good faith, the traveller arrives at a higher floor than the one departed; and declining if otherwise. Chapter Two, Annex 2, adds a qualification that has occupied the archive for far longer than the chapter's substance warrants:

"Where a traveller, believing himself to ascend, arrives lower, the stairwell shall be classified by his belief and remanded to the attention of the floor it has delivered him to."

— 71st Concordance, Chapter Two, Annex 2, clause iv

Clause iv has no known application and is defended on the grounds that it might one day have one. Sub-Librarian Vell's own marginal note, preserved in the drafting folio, reads only: "the traveller is not the stairwell's problem." The note has been cited in two dissents and never in a majority.

The Vell schism

Vell's promotion to the Concordance Reconciliation desk was occasioned, not by the 71st, but by his subsequent argument that the 71st had never taken effect. He reasoned that the 72nd, having been sealed first, had voided the 71st retroactively, and that Chapter Two therefore derived its force from the 72nd as a matter of custom rather than law. The desk accepted the argument in its general form and rejected it in Vell's specific case, on the procedural ground that his own seal appeared on both documents.

Vell wrote, in a memorandum to the desk dated some four years later, that "a seal is a claim, not a fact; the office has confused the two since the Third Concordance and will not be corrected by me." He was transferred to the western stacks and is not otherwise recorded. The schism he opened — whether a document can govern after ceasing to exist — remains unresolved and is the standing business of the Reconciliation desk.

Relation to the wider Concordance body

The 71st has been read alongside the Fifteenth Concordance since the latter's recension, on the mistaken but persistent view that both descend from the Second Concordance through a common intermediate. They do not. The 71st belongs to the line running through the Fourth Concordance and the Fifth Concordance, which the latter superseded; the Fifteenth belongs to a separate derivation whose relationship to the Seventh Concordance was settled only by Concordance Update Y54315445, which appended Concordance 91.5.02 and thereby, incidentally, made Chapter Two of the 71st refer to a document that did not exist when it was written.

Concordance 3 cites the 71st twice; Concordance 23 does not cite it at all, and Concordance 22 — which superseded the 23rd in its entirety, though the 23rd records having superseded the 22nd — cites it once, in a footnote that the Twenty-Second Concordance reproduced without the footnote's text. The Third Concordance, Annex VII refers to the 71st only obliquely, as "the stairwell document," a usage that has caused at least one reader to seek it under the letter S.

Holding

The original 71st is held under seal in the western stacks and may be consulted by written application to the Reconciliation desk. The seal is not to be broken. The desk notes that the document's own Chapter Three, clause 9 forbids its unsealing "until such time as a traveller returns from the top or the bottom with an inventory," and that no such traveller has returned. Applications are nonetheless received, and filed, and refused, at the rate of approximately one per quarter.