Annex Gamma of the Seventh Concordance

Annex Gamma of the Seventh Concordance is the principal schedule of the Seventh Concordance treating category, ambivalence, and dimensional handling, appended in the document's fourth recension and amended twice since. It is the most cited annex in the Tower and the most disputed, having been read at various times as a definition, a method, a floor plan, and a licence. No fewer than six subsidiary instruments trace their authority to it, including Seventh Concordance Annex D Clause 22 and Seventh Concordance, Annex 4. Its opening line, that centrality is a property of dissemination rather than location, is reproduced on the lintel of at least forty reference stations, usually without attribution.

Structure and recensions

The annex is divided into a preamble, nineteen numbered clauses, and a schedule of criteria by which a holding may be judged ambivalent. Clauses 1 through 6 establish that the annex applies to all holdings "whose position in the Tower is not separable from their description of themselves," a formula drafted by the Sub-Curator Lys and not improved upon since. Clauses 7 through 12 govern the display niches treated at length in Concordance 89, which integrated its dimensional protocols from this annex by reference and has been arguing with it ever since. Clauses 13 through 19 concern the instrument of realization, held under Seventh Concordance, Amendment Gamma to be the Master Index.

The first recension circulated without the schedule; the second added it; the third corrected the numbering of Clause 11 and restored a sentence on catalogic pressure dropped by a copyist at Desk Gamma. The fourth recension, current, is the only one of which complete sets survive, and it survives in nine copies, of which four disagree on the spelling of "ambivalence."

The doctrine of catalogic pressure

The annex's most consequential and least stable provision is its assertion that the Tower's structure responds to catalogic pressure — that the accumulation of description in a given region produces measurable change in the region described. The preamble states the mechanism plainly:

"A floor that is much written of will grow more like what is written of it, within limits the Sub-Curator shall determine but need not publish."

— Seventh Concordance, Annex Gamma, preamble, cl. 3

Readers of the annex have generally taken the clause as metaphor. The Custodians of Fluids Amp Flux have not. Their operational radius, defined in the same annex and later narrowed by Third Concordance, Clause 11, Annex Gamma, is calculated annually against a pressure schedule the Custodians maintain but do not circulate, and it is a matter of record that the schedule has never been audited by any office outside their own.

Ambivalence and the non-stationary holdings

The Seventh Concordance formalized the category of non-stationary holdings, and Annex Gamma supplies the test by which a holding is assigned to it. The test is not a definition but a list of behaviours, of which the fourth — that the holding's floor number changes when it is not being consulted — accounts for most classifications and nearly all appeals. When the Western Appendage to Sub-basement Gamma was reclassified in the winter of the annex's second recension, the appeal ran to eleven hearings and turned on whether a holding that is merely difficult to find may be said to move. The Librarians held that it may not, and the Appendage has been stationary in law ever since, whatever its conduct.

A holding classified under the annex is not thereby made portable. Removal requires a separate instrument, and the annex is silent on what becomes of the floor.

Disputes

Three disputes have shaped the annex's modern reading.

The first concerns the Tenth Concordance's Annex Gamma, which treats of sentience thresholds and echoes the Seventh's language closely enough to be mistaken for it. The Tenth asserts that a holding capable of describing itself has crossed a threshold and must be catalogued as a subject; the Seventh's annex asserts the reverse, that self-description is evidence of ambivalence and nothing more. Both annexes cite the same clause of the Second Concordance Annex Gamma in support, and that clause supports neither. The contradiction has been referred to the Librarians four times and returned each time with the note that the Concordances do not lapse by disagreement.

The second concerns the dual designation G/Γ, codified in Seventh Concordance, Annex Q and applied throughout the annex's schedule. The clerk who maintains the schedule, a sub-curator of the Gamma-Spiral named only in the margin of the fourth recension, has recorded on nine separate occasions that the schedule's cross-references to G and to Γ do not always point to the same place, and that on two occasions they have pointed to Clause 22, Annex Gamma and Clause 31, Annex Gamma respectively, which are not the same clause. The marginal notes have not been incorporated.

The third concerns Ordinance Gamma-7, appended to the Concordance after the annex was closed and which the annex does not acknowledge. The Ordinance instituted the Seventh Chime and, in its second article, purported to amend the pressure schedule without the Custodians' concurrence. The Custodians have declined to acknowledge the Ordinance in return. Both instruments remain in force.

Practical notes for readers

The annex may be consulted at any Desk Gamma in a Librarian-managed quadrant, where the fourth recension is held in the reference collection and the first three in storage. Readers are asked not to annotate the schedule, as the numbering will not survive it. The annex is not to be carried past Ventilation Shaft 7 Gamma; the shaft's circulation protocols, designated under Seventh Concordance Annex D Clause 22, will return it, and the returning takes eleven days.