Bureau of Pending Status

The Bureau of Pending Status is the subordinate office of the Office of the Pending charged with the registration, maintenance, and periodic re-attestation of things that have not yet happened to their subjects. It was constituted by Directive 47-Δ at the same session that created its parent office, and has occupied the same four rooms on the seventh mezzanine of Floor 2,114 since that date, with the exception of a period of ninety-one days in the winter of the Year of the Nine Seals when the office was relocated to a stairwell for reasons the Bureau's own history describes only as "space."

The Bureau is not to be confused with the Bureau of Queue Management, which manages the order in which pending matters are considered, nor with the Bureau of Uncataloguing, which manages matters that have ceased to be considered at all. The distinction is set out in the preamble to the Bureau's standing instruction and is misunderstood roughly four times a year, always by the same office.

Function

The Bureau maintains what it calls the register of not-yet: an accounting of pending conditions attached to named subjects, with the date of conferral, the instrument of conferral, and the name of the officer who conferred it. A condition enters the register when it is conferred under Opinion 102 or by the issue of a Pending Variant of a Resolution Writ, and it leaves the register only by resolution or by the formal intercession of the Registrar of Pending Determinations, who may rescind a condition and must sign the register in the presence of a witness drawn from the Witness Pool of the Seventh Mezzanine. The witness need not be literate. The Bureau has held this position since Eighty-Eighth Concordance, Annex 2, which removed the literacy requirement and left the oath.

Conditions are re-attested at intervals of one hundred and eleven days. The figure is not explained in any instrument the Bureau has been able to locate, and the Bureau has stopped looking.

History and the Hesk affair

The Bureau's first half-century was uneventful and is recorded in four volumes of blunt entries. Its reputation was made, and nearly lost, in the affair of the clerk Ovar Hesk, who in the winter of the Year of the Nine Seals processed a batch of two hundred and forty conditions in a single night in order to clear a backlog before an inspection. Two hundred and thirty-nine were correctly attested. The two hundred and fortieth — a condition of Existentially Pending attached to a matter of some sensitivity in the Vault of Pending Personnel — was recorded against the wrong subject, a stair.

The stair remained pending for eleven years. The error was detected not by audit but by a Librarian who attempted to descend it and could not establish whether the descent had occurred. Hesk's penalty was administrative rather than severe: a note was added to the register in Hesk's own hand, and the note is still read aloud to new clerks.

"The subject was not the stair. The stair was never pending. I have written the stair's name here so that it is never again reached."

— Ovar Hesk, marginal entry, Register of Not-Yet, vol. IV, fol. 212

Hesk's grievance, recorded separately in a letter to the Office of the Pending, was that the fault lay with the batch system, which permitted two hundred and forty conditions to be processed without a second reader. The Office agreed. It did not change the batch system. It required instead that every batch be preceded by a recitation of the batch number aloud, which is now done.

Dispute with the Contradiction Librarians

The Bureau's most durable controversy is with the Contradiction Librarians, who hold that the register is an ontological claim masquerading as a ledger. The Bureau maintains that it registers conditions and makes no claim about their subjects; the Librarians reply that a condition registered against a subject is indistinguishable, for administrative purposes, from a property of that subject, and that the distinction is one the Bureau has never been able to state without circularity. The dispute is conducted by memorandum and has been running since the Eleventh Recension of the Standing Instruction and produces, on average, one exchange every fourteen months.

The Bureau's position, much quoted, is that it "records deferral and not essence," while the Librarians' counter-position is that "a deferral recorded for two hundred years is a description." Neither side has asked the Registrar to settle the matter, on the grounds that the Registrar would.

Interaction with perpetual classes

The Bureau does not process Perpetual Pending or Type 2: Perpetual Pending, which are held under separate instruments and are the concern of the Manual of Perpetual Deferral and the protocols of Sub-Class Theta-Beta. The exclusion is a source of quiet pride and occasional friction, since the Bureau is frequently asked to explain perpetual conditions to visitors and refuses on principle. When the Class Beta Balancing Pending was reclassified, the Bureau returned the file unopened with a covering note reading, in full, "Not ours, and was not ours before."

Files arriving at the Bureau by mistake are held for thirty days and then walked back to their office of origin by whichever clerk is junior. The walk is regarded as a punishment and is not assigned to anyone who has done nothing wrong.

Inventory of the seventh mezzanine rooms

The rooms are listed in the Bureau's standing inventory, which is revised on the first of each alternating month and has been out of date since the Third Recension of the Standing Instruction. The list is given here as the Bureau gives it:

• Room 1: the register, the seals, and the desk of the duty clerk.
• Room 2: the backlog, shelved by date of conferral.
• Room 3: the witness room, containing two chairs and no window.
• Room 4: closed. The key is held by the Keeper of the Fourth Room, an office currently vacant and likely to remain so.

Visitors are received in Room 3 and should bring their own chair. The Bureau's standing instruction notes that this rule has been in force since the And then rescinded in the same paragraph, which the Bureau regards as an error not worth correcting twice.