Auxiliary Stacks

The Auxiliary Stacks are any stack corridor, alcove, mezzanine, or subordinate shelving run that is held to be attached to, dependent upon, or merely adjacent to a primary stack, and which is catalogued under the designation of its parent rather than under a floor number of its own. The category has never been closed. The Cartographers' Auxiliary has charted 11,402 auxiliary stacks and formally acknowledges the possibility of "some few more" (Survey Summary 61-C, filed 9 Fructidor 588). The Scrivener’s Auxiliary, which administers the survey, has declined to put a figure in writing.

Auxiliary stacks are distinguished from the Lower Stacks and from the Limbus Stacks chiefly by question of ownership. The Lower Stacks are floors. The Limbus Stacks are floors in abeyance. An auxiliary stack is a floor's annex, and its books answer to the annex's own keeper, who answers to the parent stack, which in turn answers — after intervals the Twenty-Third Concordance declined to fix — to the Librarians.

Designation and the numbering question

Auxiliary stacks are designated by hyphenated suffixes: 44-7.B, Kappa-7, and the like. The suffix indicates order of recognition, not order of construction, a distinction that has caused litigation in at least four instances. The auxiliary stacks at the Theta-Gamma Nexus, mapped by Arin Thorne before the Nexus stacks were abandoned, are numbered in the reverse of their construction sequence, a fact Thorne noted without explanation and no subsequent surveyor has been able to reverse.

Floor numbers are not assigned to auxiliary stacks. The practice is defended in Concordance 23, Annex 6, on the ground that "a number once given is a claim to standing, and an auxiliary stack makes no such claim" — though Annex 9 of the same document refers without embarrassment to "Floor 44-7.B," which no one has located.

Administration

The Scrivener’s Auxiliary holds general administrative charge, rotated biennially with the Intermittent Auxiliary under the terms of the 44-7.B auxiliary filing system. Charting is delegated to the Cartographers' Auxiliary, a subordinate bureau established by charter dated 12 Thermidor 401, whose deep-descent parties have produced the only reliable inventories of the lower auxiliary runs — see Cartographers’ Auxiliary Deep-Descent Expeditions.

The Theoretical Jurisprudence Guild maintains its own auxiliary stacks, in which are held the unpublished commentaries of Elara Vess, known collectively as the Vess Fragments. Those stacks are auxiliary to no floor the Guild will name, and the Guild has twice refused the Scrivener's request for a parent designation, citing a privilege it has never produced.

The Kappa-7 correspondence

The best-documented auxiliary stack is that of Foundational Spire 12-Kappa, whose lower runs contain Aperture Kappa-7 within a climate-controlled alcove. The alcove's humidity is held at forty-one parts, adjusted twice yearly by a keeper who signs the log in pencil. The log for the winters of 602 and 603 records no entries; the keeper at the time, a junior clerk named Halden Rusk, maintained that he had visited both seasons and had signed in ink, which the damp had taken. His request for a duplicate logbook was refused on the ground that a second log would constitute an auxiliary log, and the rule against auxiliary logs is absolute.

"No stack shall keep a record auxiliary to its own record, lest the record of the record outlast the record."

— Concordance 23, Annex 2, clause 11

Disputes of standing

Whether an auxiliary stack may petition for promotion to primary standing has been contested since the Eastern Auxiliary Ladder applied, in 441, to be reclassified as a staircase. The petition was granted in part: the Ladder is now a staircase for purposes of ascent and an auxiliary stack for purposes of shelving, and its keeper holds two titles and one salary. The ruling is cited whenever a stack wishes to be something else, which is often.

A separate dispute concerns the Sequestered Stacks, which several recensions of the survey treat as an auxiliary run of the Floor 1,337, The Autonomous Stacks. The Autonomous Stacks reject the attachment. A note in their own hand, appended to Survey Summary 61-C without signature, reads only: "We are not an annex of ourselves." The Scrivener's Auxiliary has left the note in place and the question open.

Access and maintenance

Auxiliary stacks are entered from their parent stack, never from a corridor, and the doors are kept unlocked on the principle that a locked auxiliary stack becomes a room. Visitors are asked to leave the ladders where they find them. Lighting is by cresset in the lower runs and by lamp in the upper, and the lamps are trimmed on the first of the month except in months beginning on a Sunday, when the trimmer is not in. The Auxiliary Plumbing Guild attends to seepage and has been in dispute with the Scrivener's Auxiliary over the 44-7.B drains since 574, when a joint was found to run beneath three charted auxiliary stacks and one uncharted one; the uncharted one has since been struck from the survey, though the water still reaches it.