Administrative Lacuna

The Administrative Lacuna is a standing category of documented absence maintained by the Librarians in respect of floors, offices, records, and directives that are known to have existed but cannot presently be produced. It is distinguished from an ordinary gap in the holdings by the fact that an Administrative Lacuna carries a registrar, a requisition number, and a date of certification. An absence without those three particulars is not a Lacuna; it is a loss, and is filed under Administrative Mendings until such time as it can be properly certified as missing.

The category was first formalised in Cycle 704, following the discovery that the Western Administrative Spire had for some sixty years been auditing a floor whose number appeared in no register, whose staff drew no stipend, and whose correspondence — though answered in full — arrived from nowhere. The audit was found to be in excellent order. Only the floor was absent.

Establishment and rationale

The governing instrument is General Administrative Protocols, Clause 44(b), which holds that "an absence observed in the course of duty shall be entered as a holding, that it may be surveyed like any other." This wording was drafted by the registrar Ordell Vane and has been amended twice, both times to remove language Vane had inserted and both times at the urging of the Vellum Amp Ink Conservatory Administrative Spire, which objected to the implication that a Lacuna could be "surveyed to a depth." Vane's position, recorded in his working marginalia and later published in the Appendix to the Thirty-Seventh Concordance, was that a thing certified absent ought to behave like anything else certified: it should have extent.

The Conservatory's contrary view prevailed. An Administrative Lacuna is therefore measured not in depth but in persistence — the number of consecutive audit cycles in which the absence continues to be confirmed. Most persist for two or three cycles and are closed. The oldest still open is that of Floor 2,090, certified absent in Cycle 481 and confirmed every cycle since, chiefly because no one can agree what it is the absence of.

Procedure for certification

Certification requires three officers of the same floor to attest that a thing is missing, and a fourth to attest that they have never met. The fourth attestation is the load-bearing one; the Tower has found that absences agreed upon by colleagues tend to be absences of convenience. Where the four cannot be assembled — a frequent difficulty on thinly staffed floors — the certification proceeds on the strength of a single attestation by the resident Administrative clerk, annotated solo attestation, unseconded, and these certificates are marked with a red thread along the left edge of the seal.

Nothing may be certified absent during the fortnight following the Candlelight Watch, on the grounds that the floor is not itself and its testimony cannot be relied upon.

Dispute with the Ephemera department

A long-running disagreement exists between the Lacuna registry and the Department of Ephemera as to whether an absence can be inherited. The department holds that the influx patterns observed at the Catalogue Lacuna Incident of Cycle 721 demonstrate that ephemeral matter may occupy a vacated administrative position and thereafter be certified in its place, a position set out in the Nimbus Catalogue Preliminary Ledger and defended at length in the department's Doctrine of Administrative Silence. The registry rejects inheritance outright, on the ground that a thing which fills an absence was never absent, and that the department's doctrine would render the category empty.

"Let it once be granted that a vacancy may be filled by what is not a posting, and every requisition in the Tower becomes a question of weather."

— Ordell Vane, marginalia to Clause 44(b), reproduced in the Appendix to the Thirty-Seventh Concordance

The dispute is presently stayed by Clause 911, which prohibits either office from certifying an absence during the pendency of the other's certification. Since Cycle 903 the two offices have each held the other in pendency without interruption. The registry continues to record persistence figures; the department continues to publish; neither may seal.

The Vane inventory

The registry's standard schedule, last recension Cycle 1102, recognises five classes of Administrative Lacuna. It is the only list the registry permits in writing, and clerks are instructed to copy it without annotation.

• Class 1 — Post: an office known to have been occupied, whose occupant is unrecorded.
• Class 2 — Instrument: a directive cited in three or more Concordances and extant in none.
• Class 3 — Floor: a numbered floor for which no survey party has returned a floor plan.
• Class 4 — Requisition: a request acknowledged, answered, and never received.
• Class 5 — Substantive: an absence whose subject cannot be stated without asserting its presence.

Class 5 holdings are not audited. The registry's own note on the class reads, in full: "Audited once, in Cycle 876. The auditor is not recorded. The floor is not recorded."

Relation to other lacunae

The Administrative Lacuna is frequently confused with the Lamplight Lacuna and with voids such as the Amaranthine Lacuna, and the registry maintains a standing note distinguishing them. A void is a place; a Lamplight Lacuna is a period; an Administrative Lacuna is a record of a thing's not being producible, which is itself producible, and is produced on request. Requests should be addressed to the registry in the ordinary way.

The distinction was tested during the Silence of '73, when for eleven months no administrative absence whatsoever was certified anywhere in the Tower. The registry's post-book for that period survives intact and is entirely blank, and is itself held as a Class 5 holding.

Scholarly disagreement

Whether the Administrative Lacuna is a category of record or a category of fact remains unsettled. The Tower Administrative College teaches the former, following the Thirty-Seventh Concordance, which treats the Lacuna as a filing convention and cites the persistence figures as evidence that nothing more is meant. The registry's own preamble, unrevised since Cycle 704, asserts the latter: that a thing certified absent is absent, and that the certificate is the only instrument by which the Tower may be said to know it.

Administrative Script is used for all such certificates, in the uncial hand, on the ground that the older letterform is harder to amend.