Concordance 22, Annex 7

Concordance 22, Annex 7 is the fourth of the surviving annexes to the Twenty-Second Concordance and the only one of that number to be written entirely in the negative. Where the parent Concordance prescribes what may be done on a floor, Annex 7 enumerates what may not, in thirty-one clauses, without once stating a general principle from which the prohibitions might be derived. The Librarians have never regarded this as a defect. The standard instructional gloss, repeated in the scriptorium at Annex D and copied forward in every recension since, holds that "a prohibition is self-executing; a permission requires a reader" (Instructional Gloss 44, Concordance 9, Annex Omega).

Composition and date

Annex 7 was sealed in the eleventh year of the present numbering, nine days after the Annex G recension was withdrawn and reissued. Its first nine clauses are a schedule of stairs; the remaining twenty-two concern objects, sounds, and the movement of water. The annex carries two seals, one of which belongs to an office the Annex Q register does not list, and whose holder has not been identified in writing. The Third Concordance records the same seal on a document now missing, and declines to draw conclusions.

Clause 14 is the most frequently cited and the least understood. It provides that no floor numbered above the twenty-second may be counted twice in a single ascent, and that a counter who does so "shall begin again from the stairhead, without prejudice to the distance already walked" (Concordance 22, Annex 7, cl. 14). The clause has been invoked in four disputes, three of them between the same two clerks.

The counting dispute

The long quarrel over cl. 14 concerns whether it binds the counter or the staircase. Concordance 12, Annex Δ treats the number of a floor as an attribute of the floor, and therefore holds that a miscount is a defect in the stair, corrigible by survey. The contrary reading, advanced at length in Concordance 712, Annex D, holds that the stair cannot miscount itself and that the clause is addressed to persons alone. The matter was referred to the Annex C Document in the winter the north scriptorium flooded, and returned unamended, with a note that the reference had been "received and placed with the others."

"We do not decide whether the stair erred. We record that the clerk erred twice, and that he was not the same clerk on the second occasion."

— Twenty-Second Concordance, Annex G, cl. 22

That clause has since been read as settling nothing at all, which its drafters appear to have anticipated.

The Clerks' Amendment of the ninth year

Shortly after the annex was sealed, a body of junior clerks attempted to append a thirty-second clause permitting the temporary storage of lamps on the third landing of floor 22. The amendment was struck on procedural grounds: the annex is written in the negative, and a permission cannot be appended to a document that has not admitted the existence of the thing permitted. The lamps were removed. The landing is now listed in the floor inventory as "vacant, and to remain so." A single lamp is permitted at the stairhead, unlit, and must be removed by the end of the shift in which it was placed.

Interaction with lateral status

Annex 7 is not itself a Lateral Annex. Seventh Concordance, Annex Q confirms the lateral status of the Immovable Annex and, in the same schedule, adopts the supersession timetable of Annex Δ wholesale, which has been taken to include Annex 7 by reference. Whether the reference binds is disputed. The Medical and Metaphysical Annex has ruled twice that a schedule adopted wholesale extends to the annexes of the adopting Concordance but not to the annexes of the annexes; the ruling has not been reversed and has not been followed. Annex Gamma of Concordance 19 cites Annex 7 for a proposition Annex 7 does not contain, and has done so since its first recension.

Current standing

The annex remains in force and is read in full once a year, on a date fixed by the Annex Θ calendar, by a clerk who is required to read only the clauses that have been amended since the previous reading. As no clause has been amended for some years, the reading is brief. The reading is followed by a silence of the same length, which the office has never explained and which the third annex of Concordance 88 describes as "customary and not to be curtailed."

The second annex of the Second Concordance carries a marginal note, in a hand assigned by the seventh annex of the Third Concordance to the period of the counting dispute, which reads only: "Thirty-one is not enough and thirty-two is worse." The note is unsigned. It is preserved, and it is cited.