Declaration of the Perpetual Interim

The Declaration of the Perpetual Interim is a single-sheet instrument, sealed in red wax at all four corners and filed under Spiral Mark delta-9, by which the Librarians first asserted that no floor of the Tower is presently in its final condition. It is not to be confused with the Declaration of Perpetual Quarantine, nor with the Declaration of Impermanence, although all three are kept in the same cabinet on Floor 4,411 and are frequently requested together by mistake. The Declaration does not name a date of issue. It names a date of deferral, and that deferral has not yet been lifted.

The instrument runs to eleven clauses, of which the operative one is the third. Its full text, as preserved in the recension held by the Hall of Interim Objects, reads in part:

"Nothing catalogued shall be held to have arrived at its description. Every entry is an entry in progress, and shall be amended until amended no further, and that day is not this day."

— Declaration of the Perpetual Interim, clause 3, recension held at the Hall of Interim Objects

Origin and the question of the missing floor

The Declaration is conventionally dated to the winter of Cycle 6,880, when the survey party of Sub-Librarian Oveta Prine returned from an upward expedition with an inventory of nine floors and a note that the tenth had been "encountered, entered, and found to be not yet finished." Prine's field book records bare joists, a stairwell capped with fresh timber, and a smell of lime. She refused to number the floor. The numbering dispute that followed — whether an unfinished floor may be assigned a number, and if so whether the number precedes or follows the finishing — occupied the Fourth Concordance for the better part of a decade and is generally taken to be the occasion for the Declaration, though no clause of the Declaration mentions Prine by name.

Prine herself is recorded as having no opinion on the instrument. Asked to endorse it, she wrote to the scriptorium that she "had only reported the timber" and did not consider herself competent to rule on the metaphysics of joinery.

Relationship to the Silent Interim

The Declaration is the earlier and broader instrument, and the Silent Interim is its most consequential application. Where the Declaration holds that no entry is final, the Silent Interim specifies the period during which entries may not be discussed at all. Interim Measure 1204, established in Year 1019 by Alaric of the Interim, treats the Silent Interim as a defined term and relies throughout on the Declaration's clause 3 for its authority; the measure's preamble cites the Declaration twice and paraphrases it once, incorrectly.

The practical effect is a hierarchy of silence. The Declaration defers; the Silent Interim withholds; the Sigil of Interim Silence marks the withholding on the shelf itself, and its use for tuning C-Type Resonator Cages is authorized under Interim Measure 1204. A visitor consulting a sigilled volume on Floor 2,208 is entitled to know that the volume exists and not entitled to know what it says. The reading desks on that floor are fitted with brass hoods for this purpose. Hoods must be lowered before the attendant will fetch anything.

Dispute between the Concordances

The Declaration's status is unsettled, and the archive is honest about this. The Sixth Concordance, Annex 2, holds that the Declaration is a description — a truthful account of the Tower's condition, requiring no enforcement because it merely reports what is already the case. The Ninth Concordance, Annex 11, holds the opposite: that the Declaration is a directive, that it created the condition it describes, and that floors finished before Cycle 6,880 are retrospectively unfinished by its operation. Under the Ninth's reading, the Perpetual Atrium has never opened because the Declaration closed it, and the multi-millennial interim recorded in the Register of Deferred Actions is a consequence of clause 3 rather than a fact about the Atrium.

The Interim Committee for Resonance Management has declined to resolve the question, noting in its three hundred and fourth status review of the Symphony of Perpetual Annotation that the two readings are "operationally indistinguishable and archivally expensive." The Manual of Interim Reception (MIR-7) instructs clerks to cite whichever Concordance is nearer to hand, a practice the Manual defends on the grounds that both are on the same shelf.

Amendment and the Prine grievance

The Declaration has been amended four times, most recently by the Twelfth Interim Mandate, which partially validated Alaric of the Interim's action regarding auditory flora and, in a rider, extended the Declaration's deferral to objects that have been destroyed. This rider is the subject of a standing grievance filed by the estate of Oveta Prine, which contends that the survey party's nine floors were inventoried in good faith as complete and have since been reclassified as interim without consultation. The grievance has been heard eleven times. On each occasion it has been deferred, on the authority of the Declaration itself, which the hearing officers note is not a circularity but a procedure.

Floor 4,411 keeps the three Declarations in a single cabinet, and the cabinet is not locked. Visitors are asked not to reshelve them.