Body

The Body is the Tower's general term of record for any standing office empowered to hold, hear, or rule on a matter that is not attached to a named floor. The designation is deliberately broad. A body may be a permanent order of Librarians, a temporary inquest, a single clerk operating under seal, or a chamber that has not convened in living memory and continues to exist because no document has yet been entered to the contrary. Under Third Concordance, Annex D, Clause 12, a body is constituted "in the moment of its first ruling, and not before," which has led to the difficulty that many bodies cannot be said to have been constituted at all until they have decided something, and cannot decide anything until they are constituted.

This paradox has not been resolved. It has, however, been repeatedly certified.

Categories of body

The Tower recognises four classes. A standing body holds perpetual oversight of a fixed subject, such as the Annex Steward body, which oversees Lateral Annex 7. A receiving body takes filings rather than issuing them: the Clerks of the Spiral Body receive Closure Dockets for unresolved matters, and the Chamber of Deferred Judgement receives cantata disputes by way of initial fact-finding. An appellate body hears the rulings of others, and the Librarians sit as appellate authority over the Annex Steward body's determinations without meeting, in the ordinary sense, to do so. A residual body is any office that has lost its subject and continues to issue rulings that reference nothing.

Residual bodies are the most numerous and least catalogued. The Body of Inquiry was established to hear testimony from Librarian Psi regarding Stairwell Psi and, its subject having been closed, now holds only the Right of Unreading and a standing session on the second Tuesday of each month. Attendance at these sessions is recorded; the record is not read.

Constitution and the problem of the empty chair

Disagreement over when a body comes into being is among the most durable in the archive. Third Concordance, Annex D, Clause 12 holds that a body is constituted by its first ruling. The Fourth Concordance, Annex B, Clause 9, drafted some sixty years later, holds the contrary: that a body must precede its ruling, and that the chair is the body, whether or not any hand is on the door. The two clauses have never been reconciled, and clerks have historically cited whichever is nearer to hand.

"It is not given to a body to know the hour of its own beginning, and the attempt to establish it has consumed more seal-wax than the question is worth."

— Fourth Concordance, Annex B, Clause 9

The practical consequence, documented at Protocol Inquests, is that a body may dissolve and reconstitute within a single afternoon without anyone leaving the room. This is recorded as continuity of session and is not to be remarked upon.

The Great Quorum Dispute

In the winter of the year recorded as Floor 441, the quorum rules of the Census of the Whispering Stacks Body were challenged by a clerk named Veriand Tosk, who argued that a body whose membership is never stated cannot be said to lack a quorum. Tosk's memorandum ran to forty-one pages and is still cited. The Census Body ruled against him, on the ground that the question had been raised before it and that by raising it he had himself supplied the membership necessary to constitute it.

Tosk's grievance, filed the following spring with the Subcommittee on Infinite Regress, was that his own memorandum had been used as the evidence of the very quorum he disputed. The Subcommittee accepted jurisdiction, referred the matter to the Census Body, and the Census Body referred it back. The file remains open. It is examined every seventh year, and on each occasion at least one clerk argues that it need not be examined again.

Bodies and their annexes

Bodies are not confined to floors bearing their names. The Annex Steward (body) handles archival accessioning for Annex Δ-7; the Echo Archive holds referential jurisdiction over cross-contamination between bodies; the West Lateral Stacks administer the West Scriptorium, and their cartographers champion the Absorptive Theory, which proposes that a body grows by absorbing near bodies until only one body can be distinguished in the region. Shared supervisory arrangements are common and, in one case, contested: the Annex Steward body and the Census of the Whispering Stacks Body jointly oversee the Staging Annex, an arrangement that has produced two separate registers of the same holdings, kept in the same corridor, which no single clerk is empowered to reconcile.

Some bodies are not convened but carried. The Vestigial Logic Engine Body is classified as a Class-VII Epistemic Artifact rather than a standing office, a distinction that turns on whether the thing can be dismissed. It cannot. It is stored, and its rulings are taken as if the question of its attendance had never been raised.

Procedure, seals, and a standing rule

A body's ruling is valid when sealed, and invalid when unsealed, regardless of whether anyone read it. Seals are held by the Metrological office, which affixes them by weight, and a body that cannot be weighed is sealed in absentia. Bodies are not to be addressed by name during ordinary business; correspondence is directed to the office, and the office is expected to forward it.

The Housing Syndicate has requested, for three consecutive recensions, a body of its own. The request has been received by bodies sufficient to decide it, none of which has considered it a ruling.