Curators of the Unsaid

Curators of the Unsaid are a collegiate office of the Tower charged with the identification, retrieval, and provisional classification of materials that have not been expressed on any floor and are not expected to be. Established under the Second Concordance, the Curators occupy Floors 119, 442, and 887 and maintain a standing objection to the jurisdiction of the Curators of Lacunae over matters of retrospective silence.

Origins and Institutional Standing

The office was first constituted by clause 12 of the Second Concordance, which assigned to it "the care of that which no tongue or stylus has yet disturbed." Early recensions of the Codicils of the Unsaid School make no mention of the Curators, a silence the Clerkship of the Unsaid later ruled to be itself a curated absence rather than an oversight. The Curators proper regard the Curators of the Unsaid as a subordinate specialization, whereas the Curators of the Unsaid hold, by the Fourth Recension of the Atrium Curators, that they predate the general curatorial estate by no fewer than three sinkings of the lower spiral.

In 884, the Curators of Resonance lodged a complaint that the Curators of the Unsaid had removed a resonance that had never sounded, thereby creating a second-order silence later catalogued as the Echo of the Unstruck Bell. The Clerks of the Unsaid declined to adjudicate, citing the Vault of Unsaid Precedents, and the matter remains in procedural suspension.

Methods of Retrieval

Retrieval is conducted by descent into the Aperture of the Withheld, a shaft whose dimensions are recorded as 3.2 metres square and of indefinite depth. Curators enter with uninked styluses and return after periods ranging from nine minutes to eleven years. The Custodians of the Unsaid then stabilise whatever has been brought up, though whether the objects retrieved are things or merely the shapes of things is disputed under the Ninth Annex of the Third Concordance.

A visitor may observe retrieval from the observation ledge on Floor 442 only while holding a token of the Guild of Latent Curators; tokens are issued on the first wet Tuesday of each Tower-winter and must be returned before the lighting of the evening braziers or the observation is considered to have occurred in silence and is struck from the record.

"No Curator of the Unsaid has ever spoken of what was found; this is not a rule but a measurement."

— Codicils of the Unsaid School, Spiral Note 7

Disputes with Adjacent Offices

The most sustained disagreement concerns the Curators of Absent Spaces, whom the Curators of the Unsaid accuse of cataloguing voids that were in fact spoken of in the Lost Scriptoria of Floor 12. The Atrium Curators issued a concordant memorandum in 991 resolving the dispute by declaring both offices correct within their own stairwells, a ruling the Curators of Suspension have cited as precedent for forty-one subsequent non-decisions.

The Curators of the Still Air maintain that the Unsaid includes the untasted, a position the Curators of the Unsaid reject on the grounds that taste is a form of speech. The Curators of Living Paradox have entered the disagreement twice, each time withdrawing their entry before the Clerkship of the Unsaid could assign it a number.

Notable Incidents

In the winter of 1023, Curator Mellifrax the Younger retrieved a document consisting entirely of the absence of a signature. The Custodians of the Unsaid stabilised it as Item US-1023-Δ, and the Curators of the Unsaid proposed its nomination for Archival Dust status. The Curators of the Unsaid's own counter-petition, lodged through the Curators of Lacunae, was rejected by the Vault of Unsaid Precedents on the ground that a curated unsaid cannot be its own antagonist. Mellifrax lodged a grievance with the Clerks of the Unsaid that remains, by design, unread.

A fire of unknown ignition on Floor 887 in 1108 consumed nineteen ledgers of the unrecorded. The Curators of Resonance noted that the fire made no sound; the Custodians of the Unsaid recovered the silence and deposited it in the Vault of Unsaid Precedents under seal.

Scholarly Disagreement

Whether the Curators of the Unsaid generate their subject matter or merely collect it divides the scriptoria. The Third Concordance, Annex 4, states that "the Unsaid is prior to its Curators and suffers no authorship." The Fourth Recension of the Atrium Curators, by contrast, assigns to the Curators "the manufacture of absence where nature provided only hesitation." The Clerkship of the Unsaid has refused to reconcile the two, observing in Codicils of the Unsaid School Spiral Note 11 that "a contradiction laid in the Unsaid is itself a holding."

The Curators of the Unsaid publish no bulletin. Their correspondence is conducted through the Custodians of the Unsaid, and their annual count of retrieved nothings stands at 4,118 as of the last recorded Tower-census of 1190.