Balcony of Unfinished Arguments

The Balcony of Unfinished Arguments is a semi-enclosed external gallery on Floor 44,911, one floor below the Balcony of Indecision, to which it is joined by the Disputed Stair. It is designated under Schedule C of the Concordance of Unfinished Works as a holding space: a location in which an argument may be lodged without being concluded, and remain lodged indefinitely. Approximately eleven hundred disputes are currently on deposit there. None has been withdrawn.

The Balcony measures forty-one paces along its outer rail and is open to the weather on three sides. Its floor is marked at intervals of one pace with the seal of the Office of Suspended Proceedings, which is responsible for its upkeep and which has, since the winter of the year recorded as 9011, refused to sweep it.

Function and procedure

An argument reaches the Balcony by transfer from the Hall of Unsettled Arguments on Floor 909, ordinarily on the order of a presiding clerk who has found the argument sound in part and unsound in part and is unwilling to record either finding. The transfer is made under Clause 19, which provides that an argument neither settled nor dismissed may be "set out to continue," a phrase whose interpretation has occupied the Chamber of Unread Arguments almost continuously since its adoption.

Arguments so set out are held on rails, in the manner of drying paper. Each carries a docket, a summary of its present state, and the date of its last movement. Movement is not encouraged. A docket that shows no movement for a full administrative year is stamped resting and thereafter requires the signature of two Librarians to disturb.

"Setting-out is not abandonment. It is the granting to an argument of the time it has asked for, at the rate it has asked for it, and on the Balcony that rate may be very slow."

— Office of Suspended Proceedings, Circular 6 (revised)

The distinction matters procedurally. Set-out arguments retain their precedence in every queue they have ever entered. In practice this means that the oldest dockets on the Balcony still appear at the head of lists in three separate halls, and clerks who must pass over them daily have developed the habit of reading the rail rather than the register.

Layout and the Disputed Stair

The Balcony is reached from the east by the Disputed Stair, a short flight of fourteen risers whose ownership was contested for two hundred and six years between the Office of Suspended Proceedings and the wardenship of Floor 44,912. The dispute was referred repeatedly to the Balcony of Indecision and returned, each time, with the observation that the matter was not yet ripe. It was finally resolved by Ruling S-447, which held the stair to be common to both floors and apportioned its maintenance in the ratio 9:5, a ratio no one has since been able to derive. The thirteenth riser is maintained by neither office. Visitors are asked not to linger on it.

The Balcony's inner wall carries a painted index of the arguments held in the first century of its use; the paint has faded to a uniform mauve and the index is no longer consulted. Three of the four benches are original. The fourth was replaced in 4387 after an argument on deposit, having grown unusually heavy, was found to have been resting against it.

Notable holdings

Among the arguments currently set out:

• The Vintner's Objection, lodged 3990, concerning the proper width of a disputed landing; the objection itself specifies no width.
• The Question of the Ninth Bell, lodged 4004, which asks whether a bell rung at the wrong hour may be said to have been rung at all.
• The Long Complaint of the Tile-Wardens, lodged 4112 and amended eleven times, each amendment shortening it.
• The Argument of the Two Doors, lodged 4218, withdrawn in error in 4219, and reinstated without prejudice.

The Vintner's Objection is the most frequently cited and the least frequently read. Clerks refer to it as authority for the proposition that a set-out argument need not specify its own terms; the proposition is correct, but it rests on a marginal note in the docket rather than on the body of the objection, and the note is generally omitted.

Scholarly disagreement

The Balcony's status is disputed. The Concordance of Unfinished Works, Schedule C, classes it as a holding space and therefore interior to the administrative complex of the floor, with all the immunities that attach. The Second Concordance on Procedural Space classes it, in Annex 2, as an external gallery, and hence beyond the administrative perimeter, on the ground that rain falls on it. Both instruments are in force. The Office of Suspended Proceedings has adopted the position that the Balcony is interior for the purposes of jurisdiction and exterior for the purposes of cleaning, and has maintained this position without challenge for four hundred years. The Atrium of Settled Arguments, by contrast, holds that the Balcony is exterior in all respects, a reading that would invalidate every transfer made to it since 4102 and which the Atrium advances nonetheless, annually, in a memorandum.

Relation to other holdings

The Balcony is frequently confused with two unrelated features. It is not the Atrium of Infinite Regress on Floor 9001, although its outer rail, viewed from the Disputed Stair at a low angle, appears to repeat downward without end; this is an effect of the floor's overhang and has been surveyed twice. Nor is it the Gallery of Silent Arguments, whose holdings are silent by rule, whereas the arguments on the Balcony are merely unfinished and may be read aloud by any Librarian who signs for them in advance.

Arguments that conclude while on deposit are removed within the year to the Atrium of Settled Arguments by transfer order from the Hall of Settled Truths. This has happened sixteen times. In each case the removal was recorded as a loss.