CE-312-F

CE-312-F is a standing catalogue designation issued by the Central Catalog for a class of object that cannot be removed from the floor on which it is found. The designation is held jointly by fourteen recorded instances, all of them on Floor 341, and none of them has been weighed accurately twice. The letters denote the class, coincident extent; the numerals refer to Archival Registers of Cycle 312, in which the first six instances were entered under seal in the fourth quarter of that cycle. The suffix F records the filing revision of 312.7, which replaced the earlier suffix E after the E revisions were found to describe items that had already been catalogued as places.

Definition and the Fourteen Instances

A CE-312-F is defined by Concordance 22, Clause 3 as "an extent which coincides with its own record and may not be entered in any register other than the one in which it is already entered." In practice the class covers an awkward category of holdings: pavements, thresholds, a narrow service corridor, and at least one mural panel, all of which are catalogued as objects but behave as though they were locations. An inspector who walks along a CE-312-F can measure it; the difficulty is returning with a measurement, since the measuring cord is itself then on the object and is entered, by the same clause, as part of it.

The fourteen current instances are inventoried in the stationary holdings of Floor 341 as follows: eight sections of corridor paving, three thresholds, the mural panel, one window recess, and a landing on the eastern stair. Twenty-two earlier candidates were struck from the class after review by the Bureau of Literal Reckoning; nineteen proved to be ordinary floor that had simply been mislabelled.

Early Failures of Procedure

The designation was created because the ordinary method of removal did not work. In the winter of Cycle 312 a surveyor of the Cartographic Corps, Ondrej Vask, was directed to transport a section of paving to the Base Spire 7 weigh-house for inclusion in the annual survey. His report of 312.11 records the attempt with characteristic brevity:

"The stone was raised, carried four flights, and set down. At the moment of setting down the load was still on Floor 341, as I was also, though I stood two floors below. I set it down a second time and achieved the same result. I returned it to its place. It has not been moved since and I recommend it not be."

— O. Vask, Cartographic Corps, survey return 312.11

Vask's account gave the class its name and its standing prohibition: instances are surveyed in situ only. The prohibition is enforced by the weigh-house clerks, who decline to receive any crate whose accompanying survey states that the contents are coincident with their destination.

Dispute Between Concordances

The classification is contested. Third Concordance holds, at Annex 4, that where an object and its setting cannot be separated, "the setting is the object to be catalogued," which would transfer all fourteen instances to the floor registers and dissolve class CE-312-F entirely. Concordance 44, Annex 12 takes the opposite position, that the object persists and the floor is merely its occasion.

The dispute is older than the surviving copies of either document. The Department of Ontological Inquiries has twice attempted a ruling and twice withdrawn it, most recently in the review following the Compliance Audit of Cycle 345, on the grounds that a ruling would have to fix the floor number of the eastern landing, which is among the points in question. Clerks of the Catalog have adopted the working practice of entering each instance in both registers and appending the note see also, which satisfies neither Concordance but has not yet been forbidden by either.

Survey Notes and the Mural Panel

Measurement is carried out annually by the Diagram of Perpetual Approximation, which returns a figure for each instance accurate to within the length of the cord used to take it. The mural panel is the only instance with a fixed figure, on account of its frame: 2.4 metres by 1.1 metres. Its painted surface is recorded as coincident with the wall behind it, and is accordingly not measured. Visitors to the panel are asked not to touch it; those wishing to examine it closely are asked to stand on the paving, which is itself CE-312-F 3, and to remain there only as long as they are entered for.

Correspondence on the class is filed under the designation rather than the subject, following the ruling in the Compliance Audit of Cycle 345 that a file cannot be stored anywhere other than the place it describes.