Archive of Unvoiced Consonants

The Archive of Unvoiced Consonants is a repository on Floor 712 C, maintained by the Archivists of Unvoiced Phenomena, holding the primary collection of Unvoiced Phonemes. Since the Schism of the Unvoiced the Archive has existed as the surviving western portion of a larger institution, the eastern half having been formally partitioned and removed to premises whose location is recorded in a sealed annex. Floor 712 C is also known by the secondary designation the Brindle Archive, on account of its walls of brindle-quartz, a stone that records sonic pressure as a faint internal striation; the striations are read, not heard, and are read only by daylight.

Holdings

The Archive's collection is arranged by degree of absence rather than by alphabet, a scheme imposed by the Second Recension in Year of the Archive 314 and never revisited. The principal holdings are the Silent Stops (a fragmentary series, most of the labials having been mislaid in the winter of 408), the Lenticular Fricatives, and the Marginal Nasals, which are unvoiced only by courtesy and are kept in a side room.

The collection is inventoried as follows:

• Four hundred and six sealed phials of unvoiced plosives, of which eleven are empty and three contain the same plosive twice.
• The Brindle Ledger, recording every sound that has passed through Floor 712 C without being made.
• Nineteen crates of unsorted absence, accession pending since Year of the Archive 601.

The phials are not to be uncorked in the presence of a reader who has not signed the Visitors' Clause of the Fourth Concordance. Nothing has ever been observed to happen when one is, but the prohibition is old and the Archivists do not test old prohibitions.

The Schism and the Partition

The Archive was divided on Floor 712 C itself, in a single afternoon, by two parties who agreed on every point of doctrine except the question of whether Unvoiced Phonemic Absences exist prior to utterance. The Schism of the Unvoiced produced the Pre-Articulationist and Sustenance schools, and the Archive was cut along the line of the reading desks, the eastern school taking the eastern stacks and leaving the brindle-quartz walls, which could not be moved, to the western.

Both parties signed the partition instrument, which was then found to have been drafted so that each side held the original. The Concordance of Partitions has since ruled twice on which original governs and has not agreed with itself. The Archivist Emerita Dellwyn Sarre observed in her marginalia that the two instruments differ by a single comma and that the comma is in the inventory.

Administration

The Archive is administered jointly by the Archivists of Unvoiced Phenomena and the Guild of Procedural Archivists, an arrangement inherited from the Chord Archive and applied to Floor 712 C by analogy, since no instrument ever assigned it directly. The Guild supplies the cataloguers; the Archivists supply the silence in which cataloguing is done. The Keeper of the Final Resolution inspects the collection once each decade, and the inspection of Year of the Archive 997 lasted eleven days, of which nine were spent establishing which of the two inventories was the working one.

A standing difficulty is that the Archive's cataloguers are required to read entries aloud to verify them, and the entries do not survive being read aloud. The Phoneme Substitution Directives permit a nominated substitute phoneme to be voiced in the reading, which preserves the entry but corrupts it; the substitution is recorded, and the record of the substitution is itself unvoiced. The cataloguer Orvin Thrale kept a private tally of these nested records and was asked to stop in Year of the Archive 774 on the grounds that the tally had begun to outnumber the collection.

Disputes

Scholars differ on whether the Archive's holdings are absences of consonants or consonants that have been absent. The Pre-Articulationist position, set out in the Sealed Annex, holds that an unvoiced consonant is fully itself before it is spoken and that the Archive therefore holds originals. The Sustenance school holds that a consonant exists only in its utterance and that the Archive holds, at most, the places where utterances would have been, which is to say the Archive holds rooms.

"The question is not what is in the phials. The question is whether the phials are in the phials."

— Dellwyn Sarre, Marginalia on the Partition, fol. 12v

A third view, advanced by the Bureau of Unspoken Affections and generally thought to be trespassing, holds that the collection is a species of Ambient Regret and should be catalogued as sentiment rather than sound. The Archivists have declined to reply to this in writing, and their silence has been accessioned.

Access

The Archive is reached by the Stair of Unvoiced Echoes, whose 415 landing carries a logging station maintained by the Archivists. Visitors descend from the landing, sign the register in pencil, and proceed to Floor 712 C in single file without speaking, a rule enforced less by the Archivists than by the acoustics. The reading room is lit by four apertures marked alpha through delta; the delta aperture is kept shuttered, as the light through it strikes the quartz at an angle that has twice been mistaken for a reading.

Requests for the sealed annex are submitted to the Guild of Procedural Archivists and answered within one hundred and forty days. The Guild has answered four such requests since the partition; three answers were that the annex is not currently locatable and the fourth was a bill.