College of Taxonomical Mercy

The College of Taxonomical Mercy is a chartered body of the Tower Administrative College empowered to grant relief from the full consequences of classification. Its warrant is narrow and much litigated: the College does not alter what a subject is, only what may be done to it. A thing correctly catalogued as a Minor Aberration remains a Minor Aberration after the College has ruled; it is merely spared the disposition that ordinarily follows. The distinction, which the College has defended for four hundred and six years, is the whole of its jurisdiction.

Establishment and warrant

The College was constituted by warrant of the Tower Administrative College in the winter of the year the catalogue records as 4,118, following an incident on a gallery floor in which eleven provisional subjects were processed for reabsorption before a single one had been inspected. The warrant's operative sentence has been quoted in nearly every subsequent proceeding:

"It is not required that the Tower be kind, but it is required that it be slow."

— Warrant of the College of Taxonomical Mercy, opening recital, 4,118

The College sits in the mercy annexe adjoining the offices of the Office of Taxonomical Purgation, an arrangement intended to be convenient and now chiefly a source of friction. Under Directive 14- the Purgation Office retains primacy in all disputes concerning the maintenance of loci; the College's relief is therefore procedural rather than substantive, and does not bind the Office in any matter the Office elects to contest. The College has contested that reading in nine memorials. It has prevailed twice.

Procedure

Relief is sought by petition, lodged by the subject itself, by a sponsoring clerk, or — in the case of subjects incapable of lodging anything — by the floor on which the subject was found, which is represented for this purpose by its duty steward. The petition is entered on the Mercy Roll, which is kept in a single hand and has not been copied since 4,391, a fact the College refers to as "the economy of the Roll" and its auditors refer to otherwise.

Hearings are held in the mercy annexe on the second and fourth resting-days. Petitioners are heard standing. The College has never explained this rule, and no petitioner has successfully challenged it; the College's standing orders record only that sittings are conducted "as is fitting," and the phrase has been treated as settled. Where a petition concerns a subject already entered in a Provisional Locus, the College defers to the Office of Taxonomical Purgation and the petition is held on the Roll until the Office has reviewed the designation.

Relation to taxonomical integrity

The College's work depends entirely on the findings of the Department of Taxonomical Integrity, and the relationship between the two bodies is difficult. The Department verifies non-existence; the College grants relief; a subject may therefore be certified as not existing and simultaneously exempted from the consequences of that finding, which is the ordinary condition of nearly everything the College handles. Since the Department's own operations began to recur under Clause 303.b, the College has received a growing number of petitions that are, on inspection, petitions by the Department concerning itself. The College has accepted four of these and returned eleven hundred and six.

The Threnody Recensions

The College's interpretive method rests on the Threnody Recensions, a set of nine annotated extracts from the Manual of Taxonomical Purity compiled by the College's third Warden, Alisse Threnody, between 4,158 and 4,171. Threnody's innovation was to read the Manual's dispositions as presumptions rather than commands, which permitted relief without amendment. The Department of Taxonomical Integrity rejected this reading in a memorial of 4,173 and has never withdrawn the rejection, though it corresponds annually with the College on the subject. The ninth recension is missing. The College maintains that it was lent and never returned; the Department maintains it was never written; both bodies continue to cite it.

Disputed jurisdiction

The College's authority is disputed in two directions. The College of Spacial Jurisprudence has held, in at least three rulings applying interpretations issued by The Silent College, that mercy granted within a locus cannot survive the locus's reclassification, because the locus is the unit of the Tower's concern and the subject is incidental to it. The College of Taxonomical Mercy regards this as a category error and says so in writing, at length, in the ninth memorial, which the Spacial College has not answered. Separately, the Office of Taxonomical Purgation maintains that mercy is a disposition and therefore within its exclusive competence under the Primary Series, a claim the Mercy College disputes on the ground that it has never once administered anything.

Notable petitions

The Mercy Roll's most cited entries include the petition of a stairwell on a floor now struck from the survey, granted relief on the ground that it had never been descended and could not meaningfully be punished; and the petition of Clerk Osric Vane, who sought relief from his own classification and was granted it in 4,402, an outcome the College has since declined to treat as precedent. Vane remained on the Roll for sixty years after his relief, filing quarterly objections to its wording. The Roll records their eventual resolution with a single marginal note: "Resolved by attrition."

The College currently hears petitions on the second and fourth resting-days and not at all during the inventory, which takes the annexe for three weeks. Petitioners are advised to bring their own stool.