Concordance 44, Clause 812

Scope and citation

Concordance 44, Clause 812 is the standing provision governing the reassignment of floor numbers within the Tower, and the procedures by which a floor already catalogued may be renumbered, merged with an adjacent holding, or (in the language of the clause itself) "quietly declined." It is the longest clause in Concordance 44 at 3,106 words, and the only clause in that document to carry its own annex.

Clause 812 is cited most often not for what it permits but for what it forbids: the retrospective alteration of a floor's number by any office below the rank of Senior Reckoner. In practice this prohibition has been tested eleven times since ratification, and has survived nine of those tests.

Text

The operative portion of the clause reads as follows:

Where a floor is found to bear a number not its own, the Reckoning Office shall make record of the discrepancy, and shall not correct it, save by leave granted under Annex 812-A. The correction, if granted, takes effect from the date of grant and not before. Any floor renumbered shall continue to answer to its former designation for a period of ninety days, during which time requests addressed to the former designation shall be honoured without comment.

— Concordance 44, Clause 812, §3

The ninety-day grace period is frequently misunderstood. It does not protect the floor's occupants; it protects wayfinders, of whom the Tower maintains a standing corps, from having to revise their internal maps faster than they are able.

History

Clause 812 was drafted during the Reckoning Dispute of the Seventh Pass, a period in which three separate offices claimed authority over floor numbering: the Reckoning Office, the Office of Stairwell Census, and — on the strength of an obscure reading of Clause 19 — the Undercounters' Guild. The dispute remains formally unresolved, though Clause 812 was accepted as a practical settlement by all three parties in the winter of the 44th Concordance's second year.

The clause's most cited application is the renumbering of Floor 311 to Floor 312 in the year following ratification, an error that was itself corrected twice and which produced the current situation where two floors answer to the designation 312 and neither answers to 311.

Annex 812-A

Annex 812-A sets out the conditions under which the Reckoning Office may grant leave to renumber. The annex requires a demonstration of "material confusion," defined as at least four documented instances of a floor receiving correspondence intended for a different floor within a single quarter. The threshold is widely regarded as either too high or too low depending on which office is being asked.

The annex also establishes the form of the notice that must be posted at each stairhead during the ninety-day grace period. The form is prescribed to the line, and deviations from it — including the substitution of a smaller capital for the designation — are treated as voiding the notice entirely.

Occasionally the Reckoning Office's clerks have been observed posting the notices one day early. This is not prohibited.

Interpretive disputes

A long-standing disagreement opposes the Office of Stairwell Census to the Wayfinders' Conclave on the question of whether Clause 812 applies to floors that have been merged rather than renumbered. The Census holds that a merged floor retains the lower of its two designations; the Conclave holds that it retains whichever designation appears first in the most recent Seventh Concordance inventory. The two positions have never been reconciled, and the resulting ambiguity is the stated reason why Floors 77 and 78 are each considered to be the other's continuation.

A second dispute, narrower but longer-running, concerns whether the clause's prohibition on retrospective correction extends to corrections made in error. The Reckoning Office reads the prohibition literally; the Undercounters' Guild reads it as applying only to corrections made in good faith. The distinction has mattered precisely once, in the matter of the Winter Ledger of the Forty-Seventh Floor, and the Ledger remains where it was put.

See also

• Concordance 44
• Third Concordance, Clause 19
• Seventh Concordance, Annex D, Clause 1
• Concordance 12, Clause 7
• Concordance 712, Clause 3