Administrative Granite

Definition and Classification

Administrative Granite is the collective designation, under Third Concordance, Annex 7, for all granite within the Tower that is held, moved, weighed, or disposed of by an act of record rather than by an act of building. The distinction is jurisdictional, not mineralogical. A block of Keystone Granite ceases to be keystone the moment its transfer is entered in a register, and resumes being keystone the moment the entry is struck. The Granite Library on West Spiral Stairwell, Floor 302 maintains the standing position that Administrative Granite is "granite in transit through paper," a phrase first used in a marginal note by an unnamed cataloguer in the winter of 1147 and never since improved upon.

The category is old but was not formally bounded until the Granite Library founding ordinance, clause 3, charged that body with "distinguishing between the granite of the coils and Granite Intrusion." Administrative Granite was the residue left over when neither category fit, and for two centuries it was simply called the remainder.

The Nomenclature Dispute

The name itself is contested. The Clerks of the Granite Step, who administer the Granite Intrusion and maintain its predictive model, hold that the term is a usurpation, since their own Nodal Register has recorded granite in transit since before the word "administrative" appears anywhere in the Tower's seals. In their reading, Administrative Granite is a subset of the Intrusion's logistical tail and should be styled Intrusive Granite (Scheduled).

The opposing view, advanced in the General Administrative Protocols and never withdrawn, is that the Intrusion is itself an administrative event whose granite is merely unusually mobile.

"The slab does not arrive. The slab is entered. What the Neutral Zones receive is a filing, and what the filing weighs is granite."

— General Administrative Protocols, Protocol 44, sub-clause (c)

The dispute is settled, as such disputes are, by citation. Both parties cite the Third Concordance; neither has read Annex 7 aloud in living memory, and the copy held by the Vellum Amp Ink Conservatory Administrative Spire is water-damaged at precisely the phrase in question.

Handling and the Stepped Account

Administrative Granite is moved only on a stepped account, a running tally kept in triplicate on the floor of origin, the floor of destination, and a third floor chosen by lot. The third copy is the authoritative one. Where the three copies disagree, the discrepancy is weighed, and the discrepancy is itself entered as Administrative Granite until reconciled. Small quantities of reconciliation-granite are held in perpetuity at Granite Plaza of Unheard Echoes, where they are stacked beside the Granite Step and counted quarterly by clerks who are not permitted to speak during the count.

The practice has produced its own hazards. In 1402 a single block was transferred between Floor 89 the Granite Coils and a receiving floor whose number had been entered twice in the same hand. The block was logged at both destinations, then at a third when the error was corrected, and by the following spring the register showed nine hundredweight of Administrative Granite that no floor would accept. The block was eventually assigned to a stairwell landing and has remained there since, unclaimed, catalogued, and used by porters as a seat.

Porters are required to wear gloves when handling Administrative Granite. They are not required to wear them when handling the seats.

Recurrence and the Thirty-Second Step

Because the Granite Intrusion recurs on a cycle tracked in the Nodal Register, and because Administrative Granite is defined by the paperwork that surrounds the Intrusion rather than by any property of the stone, the volume of Administrative Granite in the Tower is not stable. It swells in the days before a manifestation and thins afterward, when the paperwork is archived and the stone reverts to the Administrative Lodes from which it was drawn. Haplotype Recurrence studies the phenomenon as a model case: the stone is the same stone each cycle, but its administrative identity is renewed, and the renewal is what the registers count.

The Thirty-Second Step is exempt from all of this. By an instrument of 1188, still in force, granite laid at that step is classified as neither coil nor Intrusion nor administrative, and may not be weighed, moved, or cited in any proceeding.

Instruction and Custody

Instruction in the handling of Administrative Granite is given at the Tower Administrative College, where the course of study runs four terms and concludes with an examination in which candidates must reconcile three conflicting tallies without recourse to the third copy. Roughly one candidate in nine passes. The College's own founding charter is written on a slab of Administrative Granite, which is to say the charter is a transfer record and the transfer it records is the charter's own deposition.

Custody of the standing reconciliation-granite at Granite Plaza of Unheard Echoes passes by seniority among the Clerks of the Granite Step. The current custodian, Clerk Amarine Vess, has held the post since 1441 and has petitioned twice for its transfer, on the grounds that the quarterly count interferes with her work on the predictive model. Both petitions were refused for want of a second copy.