Conveyance

Conveyance is the collective name for the Tower's regulated systems of movement: the licensing, routing, waybilling, and delivery of goods and documents between floors by any means the Librarians have seen fit to catalogue. The term is deliberately broad and has been stretched at least twice to cover cases no one expected — once for a stairwell, once for a smell. It is administered principally by the Office of Conveyance on Floor 47, Wing Seven, under the Decree of Conveyance, which itself descends from the Decree of Luminous Stewardship.

Conveyance should not be confused with mere carrying. Carrying is what happens; conveyance is what is recorded. A porter who moves a crate from Floor 9 to Floor 12 without a waybill has, by the Tower's reckoning, moved nothing at all.

Scope and instruments

The licensed instruments of conveyance fall into four families, and the families do not agree on their own boundaries.

• Manual instruments — porters, manual porterage gangs, and library carts.
• Mechanical instruments — vertical trams, cargo lifts, and pallet-golems, all licensed by the Office of Conveyance.
• Contained instruments — transport casks, sealed and docket-stamped at both ends.
• Exceptional instruments — silent conveyance, and the disputed category of deliberate conveyance, about which more below.

Rolling ladders occupy a fifth position that is administrative rather than physical: they are licensed as mechanical instruments but moved by hand, and their waybills must therefore be countersigned twice, once by each discipline. The rule was introduced after the Ladder Incident of Floor 203 and has been blamed for everything since.

The Central Vellum Repository and the separation of papers

The Decree of Conveyance required, in its third recension, that working vellum be kept separate from authenticated originals. The consequence was the Central Vellum Repository, and the consequence of the consequence was a substantial increase in conveyance traffic, since every authenticated original now needed a working copy and every working copy needed a route. The Office of Conveyance reports document distribution figures annually and has never reported them declining.

The Ink-Scriptorium supply line is the Tower's longest continuously operating route, having run without interruption since before the Concordances were numbered. Its waybills are filed in a hand no living clerk reads, which the Office describes as "not a difficulty, as the route is known."

Silent conveyance and its protocols

Classified or paradoxically sensitive materials travel by silent conveyance, which is preceded in every case by a Silent Vigil performed by the Silent Choir. Ordinance 712b governs what may be said during the vigil, namely nothing, and what may be written afterwards, namely the register entry only. Annex 7 of the Decree of Conveyance sets out the protocol at length, and Clause 4 sets out what happens when the documentation itself is the sensitive material — the case that has consumed more hearing-days than any other in the Office's history.

The Office of Conveyance must pre-approve all silent routes and is the sole interpreter of the Decree on this point. It has approved, to date, one hundred and nine routes and revoked eleven, of which nine were revoked for being too direct.

Dispute: when a conveyance is complete

The central scholarly disagreement concerns the moment at which a conveyance may be said to have finished. The Second Concordance holds, at Annex 2, that conveyance is complete on delivery of the item to its addressed recipient. M. Selvage, Superintendent of Conveyance at Spiral 44, Aperture Delta, argues in the "Dual Aperture" theory that completion occurs twice — once at dispatch and once at receipt — and that the interval between them is not a gap in the record but a defined state, "conveyance-in-being," for which a distinct docket is required.

"An item in transit is not nothing. It is a thing in a condition the Tower has simply not troubled to name until now."

— M. Selvage, memorandum to the Office of Conveyance, Aperture Delta series, fol. 12

The Fifth Concordance contradicts the Second outright, declaring at Annex 5 that conveyance runs until the waybill is closed, regardless of where the item is, and that an item delivered but not yet reconciled remains in transit for all purposes. The two annexes have never been reconciled with one another. The Lift Minders Consortium has petitioned three times for a ruling and received three identical replies, each citing a different Concordance.

Priority and the Primary Vestibule question

The Department of Pneumatic Conveyance grants priority in resource allocation to any certified Primary Vestibule. Certification requires the vestibule to demonstrate throughput of not less than four hundred items per shift, measured at the inner door, and to keep its own tally, which the Department audits without notice.

The standard has proved difficult. In the winter of the year recorded as 4,112, the vestibule serving Wing Seven's eastern stair failed certification when its tally was found to be kept in pencil and corrected in the same pencil. The auditor, whose name the Office declines to give, noted that the corrections were "numerous and cheerful." The vestibule was decertified for two years, during which its traffic was reassigned to Floor 46, which had no vestibule and coped badly.

Practices of record

Every conveyance must carry a waybill filed with the Office of Conveyance before departure, and every waybill must name the instrument, the route, the aperture, and the clerk accepting liability. Where the instrument is unlicensed — the stairwell case, for instance, which concerned a stairwell on Floor 88 that was found to be moving items upward one landing at a time over a period of decades, without docket — the Office appoints an inspector and files the waybill itself. The stairwell was licensed retroactively in a single sitting and is now listed among the mechanical instruments.

Items may not be conveyed during the hour following the closing bell in any stairwell numbered in the twenties. This rule has no stated purpose and is not disputed.