Annex A, Seventh Amendment

The Annex A, Seventh Amendment is the instrument by which the practice of lateral annexation was formalized and the protocol for establishing Lateral Stacks codified. It is not to be confused with the Seventh Amendment to Annex a, with which it shares a designation, a ratification cycle, and — according to the Office of Recensions — a filing cabinet. The Office has declined to say which cabinet, noting only that the question is "under a recension of its own" (Office of Recensions, Memorandum 12/4).

The Amendment runs to forty-one leaves and is held in the Annex A sequence, not the Seventh Concordance sequence, a distinction that has generated more litigation than the text itself. It was ratified in the 4,212th Cycle of Record, the same cycle in which the Seventh Amendment proper was ratified, and it contains recursive clauses within Procedural Governance inherited wholesale from that document.

Scope and structure

The Amendment is divided into a preamble, nine numbered clauses, and an unnumbered schedule governing the measurement of lateral weight, a matter treated at greater length in the Seventh Amendment to Annex A. Its operative content is narrow. Clause 1 establishes that a stack may be built sideways from any floor whose number is legible from the floor above it. Clause 2 defines "sideways" by exclusion, listing eleven directions that it is not. Clauses 3 through 7 concern the surveyor's oath, the marking of the aperture, and the handling of objects that are catalogued in two stacks at once.

Clause 8 provides for the provisional certification of a Lateral Stack before its contents are known. Clause 9 was added in recension and consists of a single sentence: "Nothing in this Amendment shall be read to extend the Tower." It has been read to extend the Tower on four recorded occasions.

The contention of Clauses 2 and 9

The principal scholarly dispute concerns whether Clause 2's exclusion of the eleventh direction — the direction described only as "downward, but not downward" — is a drafting error or a deliberate silence. Partial Survey the Seventh Concordance treats it as an error and supplies an emendation. The Seventh Concordance’s Annex on Dimensional Taxonomy treats it as silence and supplies nothing, on the grounds that silence is the more useful instrument.

"Where the instrument declines to name a direction, the surveyor is to proceed as though the direction had been named, and to record that it was not."

— Seventh Concordance’s Annex on Dimensional Taxonomy, Clause 4.2

The West Lateral Stacks, established under this clause in the winter of the 4,219th Cycle, were surveyed in both readings simultaneously. The survey was completed twice, at a combined length of six years, and the two accounts disagree about Floor 709.

Administration and the empty certification

Certification under Clause 8 is administered by the Office of Recensions on behalf of the Librarians. A stack may be certified provisionally for up to nine cycles, renewed by a clerk of the second grade. In the 4,231st Cycle a renewal was filed by Clerk Anselm Vey, who recorded in the margin that the stack he was renewing had been certified provisionally, and renewed, since before his appointment, and that no one in his office could locate its aperture. Vey requested a survey. The request was returned unactioned with a note that surveys were available only to certified stacks.

The file — now catalogued as File 6-Vey — is still renewed annually. It is the Tower's oldest provisional certification, and the only one whose existence is attested solely by its renewals.

Relationship to Amendment 117.45.β

The contentious ratification cycle surrounding the Seventh Amendment led to the creation of Amendment 117.45.β, which in turn created an administrative vacuum following the decommissioning of the Seventh Amendment’s Annex on Provisional Realities. Amendment 44-B responded to that vacuum, and Annex A, Seventh Amendment is cited in its recitals, though the Amendment's own text makes no reference to any of these instruments. The citation is generally understood to be precautionary.

Recensions

The Amendment has been recensed nine times, most recently by the Seventh Amendment to Annex A, which shares its designation and cycle but not its numbering. A reader consulting the Annex A sequence should note that the two documents are bound adjacently and that the binding has been reversed twice. The Office of Recensions has stated that the reversal was intentional and that a note explaining it was filed in the correct place.

Copies held on Floor 709 are to be consulted in the reading room only, and the reading room closes at the eleventh bell regardless of what is being read.