Directive on Interstitial Taxonomies

The Directive on Interstitial Taxonomies, designated DoIT-184 in the running register of Librarian instruments, is the governing text on the classification of phenomena reported between numbered floors, in stairwells, on landings, and in any space which has been built but not catalogued. It was enacted by the Librarians in Year 7,412 of the Ascendant Catalogue and is housed in the Ledger Halls, where it occupies a shelf of its own on account of the number of recensions bound with it. It is the founding instrument of the Department of Ephemeral Taxonomies and the authority under which that Department exercises its purview over Oneiric Taxonomies and Metafictive Taxonomies.

The Directive is short. Its schedules are not.

Provisions

DoIT-184 does not attempt to name the phenomena it governs, holding that a category defined by its contents would cease to be interstitial the moment the contents were agreed upon. It proceeds instead by venue. Clause 17(b) formally defines an Interstitial Landing as any architectural interval between two numbered floors which is reachable by stair, and it is this definition, rather than any account of the phenomena themselves, on which the subsequent three hundred and eleven pages depend.

The better-known provisions are procedural. Annex V sets out the procedure for adjudicating disputes as to an interstitial discovery's proper taxonomic home, a matter that occupied the Senior Librarian for Particulate Taxonomies for a documented nine years in the matter of a single recurring draught on the stair between floors numbered 1,204 and 1,206. Annex V was amended twice during that adjudication and once after it, the final amendment removing the word "draught" from the schedule of examples entirely.

The Directive also establishes that the creation of an Interstitial Plenum occurs automatically upon the third concurrent grievance filed from within the same bounded, non-catalogued space. This provision has been invoked four times since enactment; in three of the four cases the Plenum convened and adjourned without quorum, the grievants having vacated the landing in the interval between the second and third filings. The fourth Plenum remains in session. Its minutes are not available.

The Department and its authority

Section 4 of the Directive grants authority over the epicycle of ephemeral classification to a body it does not name, and the Department of Ephemeral Taxonomies has held since Year 7,414 that it is that body. The claim has never been contested in writing, though it has been contested at length in the corridor outside the Ledger Halls. The Department's standing derives entirely from DoIT-184 — a point it repeats in the preamble to every instrument it issues — and it has used that standing most conspicuously to argue that recurring biological patterns, wherever they occur, should fall under the Directive rather than under the phenological schedules. That argument placed the Department directly against the drafters of Concordance 89, ratified in Year 114, which had already assigned such patterns to a provisional interstitial category of its own.

In Year 3907 the Directive was further read to constitute the Department of Implied Texts, an office whose founding instrument is simply DoIT-184 and a marginal note. The Implied Texts office has since issued no instrument of its own and is presumed to be operating on the authority of the original marginal note, which has not been located.

The concordance dispute

Scholarly disagreement over DoIT-184 is almost entirely disagreement over which DoIT-184 is meant.

The Register of Instruments records one Directive, enacted in 7,412 A.C. The Ledger Halls hold four recensions, of which the second and third differ in Clause 17(b) — the third omitting the requirement that the landing be reachable by stair, by which omission a great many shelves would qualify. The Department of Ephemeral Taxonomies cites the third recension. The Senior Librarian for Particulate Taxonomies cites the second and has done so in writing on forty-one occasions.

A separate body of opinion holds that DoIT-184 is properly read alongside Concordance 89, a text which addresses the same class of reports under a slightly different title and which some readers take to be the earlier and authoritative recension of the other. The two Concordances are indexed separately, cited separately, and have never been reconciled. The custodians of the index maintain that the resemblance between the titles is coincidental and that both holdings should be consulted.

"Where an instrument is cited in two titles, the instrument cited is the instrument meant, and the index shall not be amended to say otherwise."

— Concordance 89, Annex 2, note on parallel entries

Interaction with other instruments

DoIT-184 is not the only instrument to reach into the intervals. Aperture Seal Directive 7-Alpha requires the use of Interstitial Transitions when crossing between Spiral systems whose environmental catalogs are incompatible, and the two instruments overlap wherever a transition passes through an uncatalogued landing. Practice, settled by memorandum in Year 8,109, is that 7-Alpha governs the crossing and DoIT-184 governs anything found during it. The memorandum is four lines long and is held to be the clearest statement on the subject.

The Directive is also cited in the standing dispute between Directive/Contra-Directive and its inverse, where the Department of Ephemeral Taxonomies has taken the position that a contra-directive issued against DoIT-184 cannot be interstitial, because the Directive's own Clause 17(b) requires a floor above and a floor below and a contra-directive has neither. This position has not been accepted, but it has not been answered.

Practical notes

Landings under active adjudication are to be marked with the Annex V tag and left unlit. No grievance may be filed from a landing on which a Plenum is already sitting. The Department of Ephemeral Taxonomies receives callers on the second and fourth days of the week and does not receive callers during a Plenum, which is to say, at present, on the fourth day only.

In Floor 440 the Gallery of Provisional Taxonomies a copy of the Directive is displayed open at Clause 17(b), under glass, with the third recension's wording. Visitors have repeatedly noted the omission of the stair. The custodians have repeatedly noted that the display is not a recension and is not to be cited.