Delta-7 Annex

Delta-7 Annex is the administrative designation for the eastern sub-vault of Annex Delta Place, comprising floors 4,411 through 4,417 and the three unnumbered landings between them. It is not, despite persistent misreading, an annex to Annex Delta; it is an annex to the environmental jurisdiction of Annex Δ, which manages the climate of the sub-vault under a standing arrangement renewed each Fifth Concordance cycle. The distinction has generated litigation continuous since the arrangement's inception and is treated at length below.

Delta-7 Annex holds no collection of its own. Its function is custodial: it maintains the air, the humidity, and the ambient quiet in which the ratified silences catalogued under Clause 33, Annex Delta are held at the standard of preservation that Clause requires. Records of the sub-vault's readings are filed with the reconciliation desk on the floor above.

Structure and holding conditions

The sub-vault is a seven-storey shaft lined with recessed shelving, unlit except by a single aperture at the level of floor 4,414. Each shelf holds sealed silence-containers of a standard pattern issued by the Guild of Standard Measures. The prescribed conditions are 11 degrees and a relative humidity of 44 per cent, with a tolerance of one degree and two per cent.

The tolerances were widened in the winter of the year recorded as 9,204 following an incident in which a failed exchanger on floor 4,416 brought the shaft to 14 degrees for eleven days. The Delta Council convened twice on the matter and found that no silence had been lost, but that four hundred and six had been "rendered provisional" — a category introduced by that finding and never since rescinded. Provisional silences may be cited but not quoted. An inventory of the affected containers is kept at the reconciliation desk, bound in grey, and has not been requested in living memory.

The jurisprudential dispute

Delta-7 Annex is the subject of the longest-running disagreement between the Delta Council and the Gradation of Absence office. The council holds that the sub-vault is integral to Annex Delta Place and therefore subject to the Place's ordinary disposal rules, including those of Concordance 7, Annex Delta, Clause 12 governing residue from recension. The Gradation office holds that because the silences held are non-existent, the sub-vault is properly a place of absence and falls under its own scales as mandated by Annex Delta, Clause 33.

"A room that contains nothing is a room that contains nothing. It is not thereby a room of Nothing. The distinction is elementary and the Council has had eleven years to learn it."

— Clause 33, Annex Delta, marginal note attributed to the Gradation office, undated

The council's reply, recorded in Twelfth Concordance Annex Delta, is shorter and less courteous. Neither text has been withdrawn. The Third Concordance's Clause 33 annex was amended in an attempt to settle the question and instead produced a third position, held by no office in particular but cited frequently, that the sub-vault is both and neither depending on the hour of inspection. Inspections are consequently conducted at noon.

The matter of the flower box

A watertight flower box, 40 centimetres by 18, stands on the unnumbered landing above floor 4,413. It was placed there by the sub-vault's keeper of that period and permitted to remain by a ruling of the Delta-44 committee, which found that a box containing soil and a withered stem was "neither silence nor record" and thus outside the committee's competence. The ruling is often cited in other matters as precedent for inaction on the grounds that a thing falls between two offices.

The box is watered on the first of each month by whoever is on duty. Nothing has been observed to grow in it. A note fixed to its side reads: "Do not remove. Do not replace. Do not ask whose it is." No office has claimed authorship of the note, and the warden of Wing Delta-12, whose rounds once passed through the landing, has stated in writing that it is not hers and that in any case the rounds have not passed through that landing since 9,208.

Access

Entry to Delta-7 Annex is by written permission of Annex Δ, countersigned at the reconciliation desk. Visitors are asked to leave their reading matter at the door. This has been a condition since the provisional silences were created, as it was found that carried documents tended to be read aloud, and that the readings altered the quiet.

Permission, once granted, is valid for the hours of 10 and 2 only, and not at all on the days when the Gradation office inspects, which are posted on the door of the Place in advance and then, commonly, changed. Two visitors have been recorded as remaining in the sub-vault overnight by misadventure; both were retrieved, and neither had heard anything, which the Gradation office has taken as vindication and the council has taken as irrelevant.