Department of Qualimetry

The Department of Qualimetry is the Tower office charged with the measurement and certification of qualities that admit of no quantity. It occupies Floors 502, 503, and the whole of the eastern stairwell between them, and reports jointly to the Department of Applied Metaphysics and to the Department of Ontic Verification, an arrangement its own founding instrument describes as "temporary, pending the settling of certain questions" — a formulation drafted in the winter of the year the eastern stairwell was enclosed and never revisited.

The Department does not measure things. It measures how things are. A chair may be counted by any competent office; whether the chair is sincere, and to what degree, is a matter for Qualimetry.

Origins and the Founding Instrument

The Department was constituted by a single clause of the Concordance of Unnumbered Things, which provided that "what cannot be counted may nonetheless be entered, provided the entry states its footing." The phrase footing has been litigated for the better part of two centuries. The Department of Verification maintains that footing is procedural — a statement of method, nothing more. The Department of Qualimetry holds that footing is itself a quality, and therefore subject to its own measurement, and has published a table of footings (Footing I through Footing IX) that the Department of Verification has declined to countersign on the grounds that it cannot verify the footings against which the footings are measured.

Both offices continue to exchange memoranda. Neither has withdrawn the other's citations.

Instruments of the Qualimetric Bench

The bench holds four certified instruments. The gradient blade divides a quality into its degrees without severing it; the resonance fork is struck against a sample and read by ear at a distance of one hand's breadth; the salt vessel fixes a reading against decay; and the silence box, which is empty and must remain so, is opened only to confirm that a quality has entirely departed. The box is checked at the beginning and end of every shift.

Readings are recorded in qualia, a unit defined by the Ordinance of the Gradient Blade as one ninth of the sincerity of a standard apology held at the Department of Ephemeral Cataloguing since the reorganization. The standard has been re-borrowed eleven times and is currently on Floor 503 pending a dispute over whether an apology may be lent at all.

The Kettle Readings of Floor 503

The Department's most cited body of work concerns domestic objects. Beginning under the clerkship of Archivist Menneth Vaur, whose tenure is recorded in the staffing rolls without a departure date, the bench undertook to measure the reluctance of seven hundred kettles then in circulation on the residential floors. Reluctance was defined as the interval between the moment a kettle is asked to boil and the moment it consents.

The readings ran from three qualia (a kettle owned by a sub-librarian of the Department of Tattered Ephemera, described in the file as "eager to the point of impropriety") to thirty-one qualia (an unattributed vessel on Floor 611, which the bench declined to approach a second time). The full series was published as Reluctance in the Domestic Kettle, Floors 590–640 and remains in print.

A disagreement arose in the following decade when the Department of Material Causality published a rebuttal arguing that reluctance was not a quality of kettles at all but a residue of the observer's own impatience, which it had measured separately and found to be constant. The Department of Qualimetry replied, briefly, that a constant is still a quality if it is a bad one.

"The bench does not dispute that the observer is impatient. The bench disputes only the claim that this explains anything."

— Reply to the Department of Material Causality, Memorandum 14, Floor 502

Jurisdictional Disputes

The Department's boundary with the Department of Subsidiary Ontologies is contested along the whole of the eastern stairwell. Subsidiary Ontologies holds that a quality which exists only in a subordinate sense falls within its remit; Qualimetry holds that subordinate existence is itself a quality, and a measurable one, and has offered to measure it for a fee. No fee has been agreed.

A similar dispute with the Department of Residual Acoustics was settled in the Department of Qualimetry's favour by the Fourth Concordance, Annex 9, which assigned to Qualimetry all qualities that persist after their object has stopped making noise. Residual Acoustics has observed, in a note appended to its own copy of the Annex, that this is most of them.

The Department maintains no position on heraldic colours, on the grounds that colour is a quantity of light and not its business.

Procedure and the Rule of the Empty Hand

A full reading requires two clerks and a witness, one of whom must enter the chamber with an empty hand. This is not symbolic. In the incident of the eighth winter, a clerk carried a pencil into a measurement of the patience of a filing cabinet and the cabinet was subsequently certified patient when it was merely waiting to be written on. The reading was struck from the register, the clerk was reassigned to the Department of Vertical Arbitration, and the rule has been enforced without exception since.

Readings are entered in triplicate: one copy to the bench, one to the witness, and one to the Sub-librarian for Ephemera, who is not required to read it and, by her own account in the staffing returns, does not.

Present Status

The Department presently employs nine clerks, four instruments, and one standard apology, on loan. Its founding question — whether a quality may be measured without being named — remains open, and the bench has voted in each of the last forty-one sessions to defer it. The deferral itself has been measured. It reads, according to the most recent entry in the register, at six qualia and rising.