Directive 47-xi

Directive 47-xi is a standing instrument of Tower governance first sealed in the 47th recension of the Concordance of Minor Instruments and never since withdrawn, though it has been amended on eleven occasions and read in full on three. Its subject is the disposition of directives that have been issued, acknowledged, and thereafter forgotten by every office competent to enforce them. Directive 47-xi does not repeal such directives. It classes them as quiescent, assigns each a holding floor, and provides for their periodic inspection by a clerk of the Bureau of Dormant Instruments who is not empowered to wake them.

The Directive is frequently confused with HIC Directive 045, on the grounds that both concern instruments no longer in active circulation. The confusion is baseless: HIC Directive 003 provides at clause 9 that the ordinances governing HIC Directive 003 have no legal bearing on HIC Directive 045, and HIC Directive 029 is silent on the matter of quiescence altogether. Directive 47-xi is cited in tandem with neither.

Origin and the Affair of the Eleventh Recension

The Directive was drafted in response to the accumulation, over some four centuries, of directives that had satisfied every requirement of issuance and then ceased to be applied by anyone. The Office of Continuing Effect estimated in its survey of that year that 2,140 such instruments were technically in force, of which an auditor could name forty. The remainder were known to exist only because they had been indexed.

The first draft proposed destruction. This was rejected by the Standing Committee on Instruments of Uncertain Standing, which observed that a directive cannot be shown to be dead without first being read, and that reading a directive has on nine recorded occasions restored it to effect. The Committee's minute of that session is often quoted:

"An instrument unread is dormant. An instrument read is a decision. The Tower does not destroy its decisions; it files them where the floor is cold."

— Standing Committee on Instruments of Uncertain Standing, Minute 47/xi-2

The compromise — quiescence rather than repeal — was sealed as Directive 47-xi in the eleventh month of that year and has been the Tower's settled practice since.

Procedure and the Holding Floors

An instrument is classed quiescent when no office has invoked it for a period of ninety-nine years and no party has cited it in a dispute. Classification is entered on the Register of Quiescent Instruments, which is kept on a floor whose number the Register itself records and whose name it does not. The instrument is then removed to a holding floor and filed by the date of its last invocation, not its issuance — a distinction that has caused more dispute than any other provision of the Directive.

Inspection is annual. The inspecting clerk confirms that the instrument is present, legible, and unread. Clerks are instructed not to open a quiescent instrument beyond its seal leaf. In the winter of the year the Directive was amended for the seventh time, a clerk on a lower holding floor read one through out of what her report calls "simple thoroughness," and the instrument revived, requisitioned two stairwells, and held them for six weeks. The stairwells were recovered. The clerk was reassigned to the Aperture Seal Office, where she was later responsible for the reconciliation of Aperture Seal Directive 7-Alpha with its annexes.

Relation to the Directive/Contra-Directive

Directive 47-xi is one of the few instruments expressly excluded from the sifting procedure of a Directive/Contra-Directive. Where a Directive/Contra-Directive is opened over a quiescent directive, the sifting proceeds on both halves simultaneously and results in a sifted pair, which is then itself eligible for quiescence. Directive 9001.1 defends the practice of opposing contra-directives to Directive 1-Alpha when no other directive can be opposed; Directive 47-xi neither endorses nor forbids this, taking the position that a directive opposed by nothing is already quiescent in everything but name.

Practitioners have noted that the exclusion is imperfectly drafted. Clause 14 speaks of "the directive and its contrary," a phrase that appears nowhere else in the Concordances and has been construed by the Guild of Sifters to mean that a quiescent directive may be paired with any instrument of equal force, including one that has never existed. The Guild maintains a small register of such pairings. It is kept on the same floor as the Register of Quiescent Instruments.

Scholarly Disagreement

The principal dispute concerns whether quiescence is a status or a place. The Third Concordance, Annex 4, treats quiescence as a status attaching to the instrument wherever it lies, which would permit a quiescent directive to be invoked without removal from its holding floor. The Concordance of Minor Instruments, in the recension that produced Directive 47-xi, treats it as a place: an instrument is quiescent because it is on a holding floor, and would cease to be so if carried down a flight of stairs.

The disagreement is not academic. Under the first reading, the 2,140 instruments of the original survey remain in force and merely sleep; under the second, they are suspended for as long as they are stored, and a fire on a holding floor would extinguish them permanently. The Bureau of Dormant Instruments has declined to rule, noting in its annual report that it has no authority over instruments it is forbidden to wake, and that the question has therefore been referred upward for the last sixty years without reaching any floor at which it could be decided.

Practical Notes

Visitors to a holding floor are asked to sign the leaf at the door and to leave bags at the stairhead. Under Directive 47-xi as amended, no instrument may be removed from a holding floor for the purpose of settling an argument about it. The rule was added after the Dispute of the Two 14.7s, in which OVC Directive 14.7 was carried down four flights to be compared with Guild Directive Ovc 1a and returned in a condition the Bureau describes as "settled."