Condensation Ordinance Annex C Clause 7 Document

Condensation Ordinance, Annex C, Clause 7 is the operative clause of Annex C of the Ordinance governing the classification and handling of precipitated thought, and the instrument by which Pensive Condensation was first entered on the Tower's schedules as a "psychotropic precipitate, Category II-B." It is the shortest clause in the Condensation Ordinance and, by the reckoning of the Office of Condensation Records, the most amended. Clause 7 is not to be confused with Clause 22 of Annex C, which concerns the physical transport of the precipitate and which contains no classification language at all.

Text and structure

Clause 7 runs to four sentences in its consolidated recension. The first establishes the category; the second defines the threshold of precipitability; the third assigns custody; the fourth, added at the ninth recension, provides that the clause shall be read subject to any subsequent C-series addendum then in force. It is this fourth sentence that has made Clause 7 unusually difficult to cite, since the clause now incorporates by reference an addendum that did not exist when the clause was drafted and which, in the view of several Librarians, was never intended to govern so short a provision.

The clause is currently read in conjunction with Addendum 44-C to the Condensation Ordinance, ratified on 3 Aperture, 903, which is the only instrument of the C-series enforced above Floor 1,880. Whether Addendum 44-C supersedes Clause 7 at those heights or merely runs alongside it remains the subject of the longest-running disagreement in the annex literature.

Legislative history

Clause 7 was drafted under the authority of Concordance 402-A, the instrument under which the whole Condensation Ordinance was issued. Its early recensions classified the precipitate simply as "Category II," a designation that proved unworkable because it grouped condensed thought with the condensates of ordinary vapour and obliged the Condensation Conduits to be drawn to a single specification for both. The subdivision into II-A and II-B appears first in the seventh recension and is attributed to the clerk Mirenna Halveth, who argued in a memorandum of 14 Stillwater, 781, that "a substance which remembers being carried is not the same freight as one which does not." Halveth's memorandum is preserved in the Vapour Rolls and is the only document in the Office's holdings to use the phrase.

The ninth recension added the fourth sentence and, with it, the clause's habit of deferring to later documents. The eleventh recension changed a single word — "collected" to "recovered" — and provoked a protest from the Guild of Conduit Wardens that occupied three sittings of the Committee on Annex Discipline. The word has since been restored to "collected."

The classification question

Scholars disagree sharply on what Category II-B actually asserts. The traditional reading, advanced by Librarian Ossul Vane in his commentary of 812, holds that Clause 7 classifies the precipitate by its origin: thought that has condensed under pressure is II-B, and thought that has condensed under no pressure at all is II-A, and there is no third case. The opposing reading, associated with Librarian Coss and the Floor 1,204 Working Group, holds that Clause 7 classifies by behaviour after condensation, and that origin is a matter for the Ordinance's preamble rather than its annexes.

The dispute is not idle. If Vane is right, the Office of Condensation Records must log every condensation event in the Vapour Rolls according to origin, which it does; if Coss is right, the Rolls have been kept on the wrong basis since 812, which no one has yet been willing to certify in writing. Clause 22, Annex Gamma was drafted to settle a parallel question about the precipitate's admissibility in testimony and was withdrawn before ratification for reasons the record does not give.

Practical application

In practice Clause 7 is cited less often than it is bound. Conduit Wardens are required to carry a certified copy of the clause on their person while working above Floor 1,880, and to produce it on demand to any Librarian or to any person wearing the grey cord of the Records Office. The copies are issued unbound, and the Wardens' complaint that a loose clause cannot be carried without creasing has been before the Committee on Annex Discipline since 874. The Office's answer, repeated in three successive circulars, is that creasing does not constitute alteration, since the words remain legible.

Clause 7 was read aloud in full at the reopening of the north conduits on Floor 2,317 following the seepage of the winter of 898 — the last occasion on which the whole clause is known to have been recited in an official setting.

See also

• Clause 33, Annex Delta of Ordinance 7, which tentatively proposed the containment principles later operationalised by Ordinance 77-Delta
• Annex B of the Ordinance, the classification schedule that Clause 7 amends
• Annex Epsilon, Clause 2