Amendment 7 (The Protocol of Unitary Administration)

Amendment 7 (The Protocol of Unitary Administration) is the operative clause of Amendment 7 to the Fourth Concordance, and is the instrument by which the relationship between the Librarians and the various specialist Guilds of the Tower was first reduced to writing. It is not to be confused with the Protocol of Unitary Administration itself, to which it is parent, nor with the Seventh Amendment to Annex a, which shares its numeral, its drafting hand, and — according to the Office of Unitary Reconciliation — none of its intent.

The Amendment was sealed on the fourteenth day of the ninth recension, in the year recorded on the Spiral Register as 4C-118, and runs to a single article of eleven clauses and an unnumbered schedule of floor reservations. It has been amended four times and annotated continuously. Its current reading differs from its original in three places, two of which are clerical.

Background: the Guild Question

Before Amendment 7, the relationship between the Librarians and the Guilds rested on custom and on the Second Concordance, which addressed the matter only insofar as it addressed everything — by asserting that the Librarians were "the sole competent authority in all matters arising above the water table and below it, and in the stairwells between" (Second Concordance, Clause 1). The Guilds found this unhelpful. The Guild of Measurers, whose members had been certifying floor heights since before the water table was a term of art, objected that Clause 1 made their certificates provisional without saying so, and refused for eleven years to issue any.

The dispute was resolved by the Accord of the Landing at Fourteen, a negotiated settlement whose principal achievement was to postpone the question. Amendment 7 was drafted to unpostpone it.

Structure and Principal Clauses

The Amendment establishes what its drafters called the distributed competence: the Librarians retain sole authority over the naming, numbering, and cataloguing of floors, and the Guilds retain sole authority over the technical certification of what those floors contain. Clause 4 sets the boundary precisely:

"The Librarian shall say what a thing is called and where it is kept. The Guild shall say whether it will hold. Neither shall say the other's sentence."

— Fourth Concordance, Amendment 7, Clause 4

Clause 6 requires every Guild operating above the ninth landing to maintain a Guild Registry entry countersigned by the Office of Unitary Reconciliation, a provision that has since been extended by Amendment 22 to Guilds operating in the stairwells, and by Amendment 247 to Guilds that operate nowhere in particular but claim jurisdiction anyway.

The unnumbered schedule reserves specific floors to specific Guilds. It is four pages long. Floor 88 is reserved to the Guild of Weighers, a reservation that has been honoured without interruption since the sealing, although the Guild of Weighers has not maintained a presence on Floor 88 since the winter of 4C-141 and cannot now locate the key.

The Sarn Dispute

The Amendment's most-litigated clause is Clause 9, concerning the case of a Guild certificate that contradicts a Librarian catalogue entry. Clause 9 provides that in such a case "the certificate shall be held in suspense, and the entry shall be held in suspense, and the matter shall be referred to the Committee on Suspended Holdings." It does not say what the Committee is to do with it.

In 4C-163 the Guild of Weighers certified that the West Annex weighed 14,000 tons. The catalogue recorded it as weightless, this being a condition of its inclusion. Both instruments were suspended under Clause 9 and referred. The Committee sat for six sessions, determined that it had no power to resolve the referral, and referred the matter to itself. Clerk Aurelia Sarn, recording the proceedings, entered the single word circular in the margin. The Committee ordered the marginal note struck as impertinent. Sarn's note survives in the Register of Struck Marginalia, where it is the most frequently consulted entry.

The West Annex remains suspended. It is open to visitors, who are asked not to lean on it.

Conflicting Commentary

There is genuine scholarly disagreement over whether Amendment 7 binds the Guilds or merely describes them. The Office of Unitary Reconciliation holds the former, citing the countersignature requirement of Clause 6 as evidence of binding intent. The Guild of Measurers holds the latter, and has held it continuously and in writing since 4C-121, on the grounds that Clause 4 assigns authority rather than conferring it, and that a Guild cannot be bound to a duty it already possessed. The Seventeenth Concordance, Annex Δ, which defines self-consistency for Unitary entities, is silent on the point, and the silence has been read in both directions.

A minority view, advanced by the Bureau of Tangible Administration under the Protocol of Unitary Administration and never formally withdrawn, is that Amendment 7 is not a binding instrument at all but a record of a binding — an account of an agreement that took place elsewhere and in another document, the latter of which has not been found. Under this reading the Guilds are bound by something, but not by this. The Bureau has declined to say what.

Recension and Repair

Amendment 7 has been recopied eleven times. The seventh recension, prepared by the Scriptorium of the Long Landing, introduced the reading "Guild shall say whether it will hold" in place of the original "Guild shall say whether it holds," a change of one letter that the Office of Unitary Reconciliation has ruled substantive and the Guild of Measurers has ruled a copying error. The dispute is ongoing. The eighth recension restored the original and was withdrawn.

The Amendment is displayed in the Hall of Instruments on Floor 112, in a case that requires two keys. The keys are held by separate offices. Only one of the offices remembers which.