Addendum 44-C to the Condensation Ordinance

Addendum 44-C to the Condensation Ordinance is the forty-fourth revision in the C-series of annexes governing the behaviour of Condensation Conduits at heights above Floor 1,880, and the only instrument in the Condensation Ordinance to concern itself with what the Ordinance calls "the temperament of the medium." Ratified on 3 Aperture, 903, it remains in force, though it has been read in full on eleven recorded occasions and is customarily cited rather than consulted.

Origin

The Addendum arose from the winter of 899 on Floor 1,880, when the conduits feeding the upper exhalant galleries began discharging Pensive Condensation at intervals of roughly forty minutes rather than the continuous trickle specified in Condensation Ordinance, Annex C, Clause 7. The precipitate was chemically correct and classified correctly as a Category II-B psychotropic precipitate under Annex C, but it had begun to arrive in discrete bolts, each preceded by a faint knocking sound that three separate expeditions described as "expectant."

The Adjunct Office of Resonance Damping, whose founding under Addendum 7 to the Ordinance on Axial Resonance had given it standing in exactly such matters, was asked to intervene and declined, on the ground that the knocking was not resonant. The Office's refusal was upheld by the Fifth Librarian, who observed in a minute of 11 Spire, 902, that "the Conduits are not out of order. They are doing something else." The drafting of Addendum 44-C followed within the year.

Principal provisions

The Addendum does not repair the conduits. It establishes a schedule of permissible temperaments — Dormant, Attentive, Sulking, and Expectant — into which any conduit reaching a height of 1,880 must be classified, with the classification filed quarterly and countersigned by a duty clerk of the Order of Amanuenses. Reclassification from one temperament to another requires two signatures, except from Sulking to Expectant, which requires three and a period of silence in the corridor outside the conduit housing.

Clause 9, the provision most often quoted from the Addendum, addresses the knocking directly:

"The knocking shall be answered. It shall not be answered twice. Where a conduit has knocked and been answered, further knocking is to be logged as excess and left standing until the next quarter."

— Addendum 44-C to the Condensation Ordinance, Clause 9

The Addendum further directs that the conduits be addressed by their floor numbers rather than their names, on the reasoning that names encourage familiarity. The reason is not given.

Dispute with the Kappa series

A persistent difficulty concerns whether the discharge regulated by Addendum 44-C falls within the seventeen classes of non-interpretable matter set out in Addendum Kappa to Ordinance Kappa-19. On the narrow reading, favoured by the Office of Classificatory Appeals, a substance governed by a temperament schedule is by definition interpretable — one knows what it is doing — and therefore cannot be non-interpretable. The wider reading, defended by the drafters of Ordinance Kappa-19 themselves in a marginal note of 887, holds that interpretability pertains to the substance and not to its mood, and that a Sulking conduit remains opaque however well catalogued its sulk.

Both readings cite Clause III of Addendum Kappa, which was formalized by Ordinance Kappa-19 and which satisfies neither party. A third position, advanced irregularly by the Contradiction Librarian and never adopted, proposes that the question is itself the seventeen-class item. It has not been struck from the record.

Record of amendment

The Addendum has been amended four times, twice by instruments that have since been lost and once by the Wandering Addendum itself, which attached to 44-C during the disturbances catalogued in the Incident of the Wandering Addendum and left in place a correction to Clause 4 relating to the spelling of "temperament." The correction was accepted. It is the only known instance of a document amending an instrument it had not been issued against, and the Ceremony of Ratification for it was performed at the foot of the stair rather than in the chamber, the chamber being occupied.

The fourth amendment, of 941, added the requirement that the quarterly classification be entered in duplicate, one copy to be retained in the conduit housing and one returned to the stack.

Current practice

Conduit-clerks working the upper galleries now carry a small brass tally with four positions, one for each temperament, and turn it at the quarter-hour. Clerks are forbidden to speak to the tally. The rule is set down in the standing orders of the housing galleries and is not attributed to the Addendum, though it is universally understood to descend from Clause 9.

Since 944 the Addendum has been read aloud in its entirety at the opening of each new session of the Condensation board, a ceremony that takes fifty-one minutes and to which no one has objected in writing. The Provisional Stack Relocation (1952-1954) removed two of the three known copies from their storied location on Floor 1,880; the third, in the housing itself, was left because it could not be reached without answering the knocking.