Chamber of Unanswered Questions

The Chamber of Unanswered Questions is a sealed hearing-room on Floor 111, situated at the western end of the corridor joining the Log of Unanswered Questions to the Anteroom of Unanswered Questions. It is the room in which Unanswered Questions are formally heard — read aloud, entered into the register, and pronounced closed to answer. The Chamber does not answer questions. This is not an accident of staffing. It is the whole of its function, and every attempt to widen that function has been struck down.

By convention the Chamber is described as "the ear of the Log," a phrase first used in Concordance 44 and repeated without attribution in four later instruments. Visitors expecting an archive are directed instead to the Vault of Unanswered Questions on Spiral 899; the Chamber holds no documents and admits none, and a sign at the threshold requests that nothing be carried in past the blue mark on the floor. Pencils are permitted.

Construction and siting

The Chamber occupies a former binding-room of eleven and a half paces by seven, which explains both its unusually deep shelving recesses and the persistent smell of glue. The recesses were bricked over in VR 212 after an Unanswered Question was found to have been filed there and could not afterwards be located; the bricks were left unplastered as a record of the loss, and are counted annually by the Sub-Department of Perpetual Registries. The room has one door, one bench, and no seat for the questioner, a point of some grievance in the ledger of Floor 111 which records seven petitions on the matter between VR 300 and VR 388, all refused.

Acoustics were found defective in VR 260, when questions posed at the door were heard at the bench but not recorded; the Bureau of Acoustic Conformity reset the ceiling vaults to a reverberation of four seconds, which the Log accepted and which has not been revisited. Clerks are advised to speak at a measured pace, as a question delivered too quickly will overlap its own echo and be entered twice.

Procedure of hearing

A hearing requires three officers: a Reader, who pronounces the question; a Warden of the Chamber, who confirms that it has been heard and not answered; and a notary of the Register of Unanswered Questions, who enters the fact of the hearing into the primary ledger. The question itself is not entered. The Register records only that something was heard, its length in words, and whether the Reader stumbled. Stumbles are not corrected; under Concordance 44, Annex 2, a stumble is part of what was heard.

"Let the question be spoken once, and let no voice follow it. A room that answers is a room that has misunderstood its office."

— Concordance 44 on the Sealing of Rooms, Clause 9

The Warden's confirmation is given by striking a brass rule against the bench once, twice, or — in hearings where the question exceeds four hundred words — three times. The rule is the same instrument used to measure the bricked recesses and is missing a quarter-inch from its end, so measurements taken with it run slightly long. The Gallery of Unanswered Questions has petitioned twice for the loan of the rule for its exhibit cases and been refused both times.

The Akerly dispute

In the winter of VR 431 the Warden of the period, Warden Akerly, began closing hearings with the phrase "it will be considered," a formula borrowed from the Symposium of Unanswered Queries and not authorised for use in the Chamber. Within a season, forty-one questioners had returned to the Chamber to ask when consideration would conclude. The Log ruled in VR 432 that the phrase constituted an implied answer and ordered it struck from the Warden's speech, together with the word "presently" and the gesture of raising a hand.

Akerly complied and then substituted a short bow, which the Register found in VR 434 to be "an answer by posture." The Warden was removed to the Repository of Unanswered Questions and the Chamber stood without a Warden for eleven months, during which hearings were conducted by the notary alone and the brass rule was struck against the bench by a junior clerk using a book, an irregularity later regularised by Concordance 47. Akerly's successor, Warden Sethwick, compiled the Schedule of Permissible Silences — seven silences, graded by duration — which remains the standard and which forbids, at Clause 4, any silence accompanied by an expression.

Relation to other holdings

The Chamber is often confused with the Chamber of Perfect Questions on the floor above, from which it is separated by nothing but a landing and a disagreement about carpets. The two are administratively distinct: the Perfect Questions are heard elsewhere and answered nowhere, whereas the Chamber of Unanswered Questions hears questions that have no answer and closes them. The Aperture of Regressive Questions is sometimes said to open off the Chamber's eastern recess, but the brickwork is continuous there and the Secondary Copy of the Log of Unanswered Questions records no such opening.

Hearings of Questions Posed in Untranslatable Media are not conducted here; those are distinguished from Unanswered Questions by the nature of their inaccessibility and are handled under the criteria enumerated in the Log without a hearing, since a Reader cannot pronounce what cannot be pronounced. Prospective Answers Without Questions are likewise heard in the Anteroom, their question-forms having been validated in advance by the Register of Unanswered Questions.

Access and standing instructions

The Chamber admits questioners by appointment entered at the Anteroom, and admits no one during the ringing of the eleventh bell, when the recesses are counted. Visitors are asked to leave the door ajar by the width of a hand; the Chamber's draught is not decorative but draws the sound away from the corridor, where a question overheard has on three recorded occasions been answered by a passer-by and the hearing voided. The most recent such voiding occurred in VR 486 and the resulting exchange remains the only Answer known to have been given inside the Chamber, which the Log describes as "regrettable and closed."

The Log of Unresolved Awakenings maintains a standing request that hearings not be scheduled before the fourth bell, on grounds it has never fully set out. The request has been honoured since VR 391.