Amendment Annex Σ.7

Amendment Annex Σ.7 is a legislative instrument of the Spiral Concordance (Σ), appended to Amendment Σ-22 in the forty-first recension of the Master Amendment Log. It is best known for having introduced the class of putative floors — levels of the Tower that hold catalogue entries, receive visitors, and are numbered, but which the numbering office has declined to certify as existing in the vertical sense. The Annex runs to fourteen clauses and one schedule; the schedule is blank, and has been blank through six revisions, a matter taken up below.

Origin and drafting

Amendment Annex Σ.7 was drafted in the winter following the collapse of the Seventeenth Concordance Amendment, when an expedition returning from the interval between Floors 4,118 and 4,119 filed an inventory listing nine hundred and forty rooms, a refectory in working order, and a staircase continuing upward. The interval had previously been catalogued as a stairwell of no fixed depth. The expedition's surveyor, whose name the record gives only as the clerk of the third descent, argued that the rooms could not be struck from the inventory without also striking the two hundred and six persons who had signed the visitor's register.

The Librarians did not accept that argument. They accepted its consequences. Under the drafting hand of the sub-archivist then attached to the Ninth Concordance, Annex D, the Annex established that a floor may be held without being certified, and that the difference is administrative rather than spatial. Certification is now the business of the Annex of Litigious Outcomes, which has never issued one.

"A putative floor is to be treated as fully furnished for all purposes of cataloguing, quarantine, and the collection of overdue loans, and as absent for all purposes of construction, demolition, and appeal."

— Spiral Concordance (Σ), Amendment Annex Σ.7, Clause 3

The Schedule and its blankness

Clause 9 requires that the Annex carry a schedule listing every putative floor by number and name. The schedule has never been completed. The reason is recorded plainly in the marginalia of the fourth revision: the number of putative floors increases whenever the schedule is consulted, because consulting the schedule requires ascending to the floor on which it is kept, and that floor is itself putative. The drafting office has twice attempted to break the recursion by keeping the schedule on a certified floor. Both attempts produced a schedule that listed only the certified floor on which it was kept, which was correct and useless.

Amendment 117.45.β was passed in an attempt to close the matter and instead added a second blank schedule, required to list the floors that the first schedule could not. It is also blank.

Relationship to reciprocal conduit space

The Annex relies throughout on the geometry established by Amendment Σ, which introduced Reciprocal Conduit Space and thereby made it possible to speak of two floors occupying the same address without either being displaced. Earlier instruments had assumed that a floor and its conduit were distinct. Amendment Annex Σ.7 does not, and Clause 11 provides that where a putative floor and a certified floor share a number, the certified floor holds the number and the putative floor holds the address. In practice this means correspondence sent to a putative floor arrives, is logged, and is answered by the certified floor's porter, who is not permitted to open it.

This arrangement was tested at length during the dispute of Floors 2,044 and 2,044, which the Nineteenth Concordance Amendment 7 had attempted to resolve by reassigning one of them to 2,044-b. The reassignment held for eleven years. It then lapsed, without explanation, on a date the numbering office declines to specify.

Amendment and supersession

Amendment Annex Σ.7 has been amended four times. Clause 4 of Annex 7 C superseded its Clause 33 — a numbering irregularity, as the Annex has only fourteen clauses — and by doing so rendered the greater part of the Annex obsolete for a period of nineteen years, during which putative floors were catalogued under the general provisions of Annex A, Seventh Amendment and measured for lateral weight like any other holding. The measurements were taken. They were consistent. No one has been able to say what they were measurements of.

The Annex was restored to force by Amendment 12-b, the corrective annex to Concordance 22 Amendment 12, which found that the supersession had been entered against the wrong instrument and struck it. Whether the nineteen years of lateral weight records are now void, or merely orphaned, remains before the Twenty-Second Concordance. The Ninth Concordance requires periodic review of such orphaned affects, and the review is now in its third decade.

Practical notes

Visitors proceeding to a putative floor must surrender their boots at the head of the stair and collect them on return; the rule appears at Clause 13 without explanation and is enforced without exception. Porters on certified floors sharing an address with a putative one are reminded that post is not to be opened, forwarded, or returned to sender. The Annex itself may be consulted on request. It is kept on Floor 2,044.

There are two of them.