Declaration of Conditional Latency

The Declaration of Conditional Latency is a class-two declaratory instrument, first registered under seal on Floor 118 in the winter of the year recorded as 3,041 by the internal reckoning, by which a depositor asserts that a thing is not absent but merely unexhibited. It is not a document about delay in the ordinary sense; it is a document about the administrative location of a thing that has not yet been permitted to appear. A Declaration of Conditional Latency does not describe where an object is. It describes where the object is held, which the Office of Final Forms has repeatedly ruled is a different question and, in its words, "the only question of consequence" (Office of Final Forms, Ruling 88-c, marginalia).

The instrument is distinct from its near neighbours and is frequently confused with them by first-year copyists. Where Conditional Authority concerns who may permit an exhibition, the Declaration of Conditional Latency concerns the interval before permission is sought at all. Where the Declaration of Adjacent Intent names a thing that is nearly the thing in question, the Declaration of Conditional Latency names the thing itself and states that it is not yet somewhere. The distinction is preserved in the Lexicon of Conditional Phrases under the entry "not-yet-somewhere," which the Lexicon glosses as "a location held in reserve by the withholding of exhibition rather than by distance."

Form and construction

The Declaration is executed on a single leaf of registration stock, ruled to nine lines. The declarant supplies the designation of the latened thing, the floor of intended exhibition, and an estimate of duration expressed in whole intervals of the Tower's counting. The estimate is understood to be conjectural, and by long custom is written in a lighter ink than the rest. No declaration is accepted with the duration left blank, though a blank duration has on four recorded occasions been accepted anyway and later reconciled.

Each declaration must be countersigned by a Registrar of Latent Registration, an office whose incumbents are appointed for life and whose names are entered in the roll in the order of their appointment and never removed. Since 3,058 the office has had one incumbent, Registrar Ovin Halloway, who has countersigned the declarations of roughly eleven thousand latened things, none of which has been exhibited, and who maintains that this is not a failure but a correct reading of the form.

Relationship to the Manual

The Declaration draws its theory directly from the Manual of Material Latency, whose treatment of the Latency Vector supplies the measure by which a conditional latency is assessed. The Vector is defined there as the measurable distance between a thing's latent registration and its permissible exhibition, and the Declaration is the instrument that fixes the first term of that distance. Without a Declaration, the vector cannot be computed, and a thing without a computable vector is, in the phrasing of Declaration 12, "unfiled and therefore unspoken."

The School of Latent Materialism holds that the Declaration is a courtesy extended by the archive to the object, permitting the object to be described before it is permitted to be seen. The School's position rests on Clause 1, which treats latency as constitutive rather than incidental, and which implies that a thing which is never declared latened is, in some administrative sense, never fully a thing at all. This reading has been contested by the Order of Numerative Registrars, who follow On Gradations of Latency in holding that latency precedes declaration and that the Declaration merely discovers what already obtains. The dispute has run since 3,064 and has produced eleven memoranda, none of which has been withdrawn.

Contradiction between the Concordances

The most persistent difficulty in the Declaration's history is the disagreement between Second Concordance and Fifth Concordance on the matter of revocability. The Second Concordance, at Annex 7, states flatly that a declaration of conditional latency, once sealed, "abides until exhibition or until the floor is struck from the roll." The Fifth Concordance, at Clause 19, states with equal flatness that such a declaration lapses automatically after seven intervals, "the archive having no interest in indefinite withholding." Both texts are in force. The Concordance Arbitration Bench has declined to reconcile them on the ground that a reconciliation would itself require a Concordance, and the bench has not been authorised to issue one.

"The declarant is advised that the duration of a conditional latency is governed by the instrument in force at the hour of sealing, except where the Fifth Concordance governs, in which case it is not."

— Second Concordance, Annex 7, appended note

In practice the contradiction is managed rather than resolved. Declarations sealed before the noon bell are treated as abiding; those sealed after it are treated as lapsing. The arrangement has no textual authority and is observed with great strictness.

The Halloway inventory dispute

In the winter of 3,071, Registrar Halloway submitted an inventory of four hundred and six conditional latencies declared on Floor 118 between 3,041 and 3,070, together with a note observing that every one of the four hundred and six had lapsed under the Fifth Concordance but that none had been struck from the roll, and asking which register he should correct. The Office of Final Forms returned the inventory unopened with a slip reading "Not a form." Halloway resubmitted it on Form γ-7, "Declaration of Conditional Reality." It was returned again, this time opened and annotated: the Office observed that Form γ-7 concerns counterfactual entries and that the four hundred and six were not counterfactual, being merely absent. Halloway's third submission, in 3,073, was accompanied by a covering letter of nineteen pages. The covering letter is now held in the Vault of Conditional Authority on Floor 404, having been transferred there on a declaration of Regulatory Stasis, and is the only part of the dispute that has been formally archived.

The four hundred and six entries remain in the roll. Halloway still countersigns. Declarations are still sealed after the noon bell, and lapse, and are not removed. Visitors to Floor 118 are asked not to lean on the registration desk, which is older than the floor and has been repaired twice.

Current practice

The Declaration is today executed chiefly by the Bureau of Unshown Objects and by private depositors seeking to establish that a thing withheld from exhibition is withheld lawfully. Sealing takes place at the registration desk on Floor 118 between the hours of the first and the eleventh bell; the seal is impressed in red wax and is not to be touched until it has cooled, a precaution introduced after the smudging incident of 3,049, in which forty-one declarations were invalidated by a single thumb and had to be resealed at the depositors' expense.

No declaration has yet been followed by an exhibition. The Office of Conditional Exhibition notes that this is not to be wondered at, since exhibition requires a separate instrument, and that office has never received one.