Concordance 11, Annex C

Concordance 11, Annex C is the third of the four surviving schedules attached to the Eleventh Concordance, and the only one whose authority is exercised chiefly in reverse. Where other annexes instruct, Annex C withdraws. It is a register of permissions previously granted and subsequently un-granted, maintained continuously since the eleventh recension and consulted by clerks of the Order of Registrars before nearly every act of consequence in the middle floors.

The Annex occupies a single alcove on Floor 6,041, a room 2.4 metres square with a north-facing aperture. It contains no text of its own. Its content is the accumulated record of withdrawals entered against other documents, each entry consisting of a citation, a date, and a single line stating what may no longer be done.

Origin

The Eleventh Concordance was compiled in the winter of the year the Tower's calendar records as 3,318, following a dispute between the Bureau of Lower Lending and the Office of Weights and Reckonings over whether a granted permission could be revoked once relied upon. The Bureau held that reliance perfected the grant. The Office held that no grant was perfected until it had been used three times, and that use was itself revocable.

"A leave once given is a leave given; a leave thrice given is a leave owed."

— Eleventh Concordance, Annex A, Clause 9

Annex C was drafted to avoid deciding the question. It neither affirms nor denies revocability; it simply lists, in order, every permission the Librarians had by then withdrawn, so that the dispute might be settled by inventory rather than argument. The inventory has never been closed. The question has never been decided.

Structure and maintenance

Entries are numbered in the order of withdrawal, not of grant, and are written on the reverse of the page bearing the original permission where that page is available. Where it is not, the entry is written on a slip of underglazed card and pasted into the register at the position the original would have occupied. Roughly one entry in nine is a slip. Slips are pasted only on the third day of the week, a rule introduced after the Pasting Incident of Floor 4,880 in which two hundred slips were affixed in a single afternoon and the register had to be re-collated from memory.

Maintenance falls to the Annex Clerk, a post held since 4,102 by Ovin Marrow, who has entered 11,407 withdrawals and contested 38. Marrow's grievance is a matter of record: he holds that withdrawals entered by his predecessor, Tessil Marrow (no relation, though the Bureau of Lineages has twice been asked to confirm this), were entered in a hand indistinguishable from his own, and that he is therefore credited with errors he did not make. The Bureau of Lineages has declined to rule. Marrow has declined to stop asking.

The withdrawals in practice

The withdrawals are not organised by subject and cannot be searched by it. A reader seeking to know whether some act is still permitted must read the register forward from the date of the relevant grant, which in the case of long-lived permissions may require reading eleven thousand entries.

The most cited withdrawal is C-008, which removed the right of the Survey Corps to descend past Floor 5,000 without filing a prior inventory. The Corps complied for four hundred floors by filing inventories of what it expected to find, and then discovered that an inventory of expectation is not an inventory, and that no one had withdrawn the requirement to file one. It has filed both ever since.

A quieter example is C-2,114, which withdrew the permission of the Scriptorium of Floor 3,309 to copy Annex C itself. The Scriptorium had been producing three copies a decade. The withdrawal was entered on a slip, pasted correctly, and discovered only when the fourth copy was delivered and refused.

Disagreement among the Concordances

The Annex's status is contested. Concordance 9, Annex Omega provides that a withdrawn permission is void from the date of withdrawal only, and that acts done in reliance upon it beforehand stand. Third Concordance, Annex VII provides the opposite: that a withdrawn permission is void from the date of its original grant, and that reliance is a matter for the relying party to regret.

Seventh Concordance, Annex Q resolved the conflict by adopting Annex Δ's schedule of supersessions wholesale, which by its terms supersedes Annex C in respect of any entry pasted on card and leaves it in force in respect of any entry written in ink. The consequence is that the register's authority varies entry by entry according to its physical substrate, a principle the Concordance Commission has upheld twice and characterised once as "unfortunate but settled" (Concordance 23, Annex Delta, Clause 4).

A minority reading, advanced by Registrar Hen Ottaway and not adopted, holds that Second Concordance, Annex D's provisional holding protocol for Annex 19b applies to pasted entries as well, which would place every slip in Annex C under provisional hold and render the register, in Ottaway's phrase, "a book of things that might not have happened" (memorandum of 4,417, unseconded). No copy of the memorandum survives in the Scriptorium; Ottaway's own is kept in the alcove, pasted in.

Access

The Annex is open to any holder of a reading warrant for the middle floors. Readers are asked not to lean on the register, as the paste softens in warmth. The alcove has one stool. It has been broken since 4,388 and is listed as withdrawn under C-6,902, which the Annex Clerk has twice attempted to withdraw and cannot, because the withdrawal of a withdrawal is not a permission and Annex C records only permissions.