Directorate of Rumour Notarisation

Directorate of Rumour Notarisation is the administrative bureau of the Tower responsible for the certification, archiving, and, where warranted, the expunction of circulating statements concerning the structure of the Tower itself. It is one of the older directorates and among the least liked. Its remit is set out in the Third Concordance and refined, extensively and not always compatibly, by the Ninety-Second Concordance; its daily operations are conducted through Rumour Notarisation, the formal practice by which an unverified statement is assigned a unique veridical address and thereby rendered citable. The Directorate maintains no field staff of its own, relying instead on the Clerks' Collective to receive petitions and on Librarians' adjutants to review submissions before notarisation.

Establishment and premises

The Directorate occupies the eastern arm of Floor 612, a floor it shares, uneasily, with the Directorate of Sequence and a water-closet that neither directorate will accept responsibility for. Its charter is dated to the winter of the year recorded in the register as 611/7, when a dispute over whether the north stairwell of that floor had ever existed at all produced forty-one mutually incompatible sworn accounts in a single week. The Bureau of Architectural Integrity was subsequently instructed to receive such accounts, and the Directorate was carved out of it to hold them.

The Directorate's founding instrument is unusually brief. Its operative clause reads, in full: "Statements about the Tower shall be written down, and the writing down shall be done in a place." (Charter of the Directorate of Rumour Notarisation, clause 1.) Successive Directors have treated the second half of that sentence as the more demanding.

The premises include a public counter, three scriptoria, a sealed annexe known as the Quiet Room, and the celebrated intake shelves, which hold Rumour Cistern material pending valuation. Visitors are asked to leave the outer door open. The Directorate has never explained why and the request is printed above the counter in letters larger than anything else on the wall.

Procedure

A statement reaches the Directorate only by petition. The petitioner files Form 7-Lambda, titled "Petition for Acoustic Stabilisation," which requires the statement as heard, the floor on which it was heard, the names of two witnesses, and the direction from which the speaker's voice was travelling. Petitions without a direction are held at the counter and, if unclaimed after ninety days, are reduced to a single line in the annual digest.

Accepted petitions are given a veridical address — a floor designation, a spiral letter, and a four-digit aperture mark — and enter the Cistern system for investigation. Two investigators are dispatched, one to the floor named and one to the floor two floors above it, on the standing reasoning that rumours drift upward. Findings return to the Directorate, where a notary either ratifies the statement into the architectural record or expunges it. Expunction is not destruction: an expunged rumour is retained, struck through, and remains citable by its strike-number.

In the year 611/7 alone the Directorate ratified 1,204 statements and expunged 1,192, a symmetry the Director at the time described as "satisfactory, if unnerving" (Annual Report of the Directorate of Rumour Notarisation, 611/7, preface).

The Aperture Dispute

Disagreement persists over the aperture mark. The Third Concordance directs that the mark be assigned at the moment of hearing, by the hearer, on the ground that proximity guarantees accuracy. The Ninety-Second Concordance requires the mark to be assigned by a notary at intake, on the ground that hearers are unreliable and, in the words of Annex 9, "have been known to be the rumour."

The Directorate has resolved this by keeping two registers, one maintained by the hearers and one by the notaries, and consulting whichever register supports the file in front of it. In 588/3 the notary Elleswyth Vane petitioned for a ruling and was told, by memorandum, that a ruling "would prejudice the flexibility of the arrangement." Vane spent the remainder of their tenure annotating that memorandum, and the annotated copy is still consulted when the two registers disagree.

Jurisdictional friction

The Directorate's boundaries are contested on three sides. The Acoustical Cartographers' Guild holds that Rumour Cisterns are acoustic features and therefore its own, a claim the Directorate has never formally denied and has never once honoured. The Directorate of Cartographic Review asserts authority over any rumour mentioning a corridor, on the grounds that corridors are its subject regardless of what is said about them; the resulting rule of practice, that a rumour is reviewed twice and filed once, is responsible for most of the Directorate's arrears. The Directorate of Environmental Coherence has claimed no fewer than eleven rumours of its own concerning damp.

Relations with the Directorate of Contextual Reconciliation are colder. The two offices have disputed since 574/2 whether a rumour should be reconciled before notarisation or notarised before reconciliation, and neither has conceded that the question may be badly put.

The sump of Floors 899–901

The Directorate's most persistent problem is hydrological. Ventilation Shaft 7 Gamma is hydrologically linked to the cisterns on Floors 899–901, and in wet seasons the shaft delivers cistern water directly onto the intake shelves of Floor 612. The water carries conversational fragments from the rumour-heavier floors below, which dry onto the shelves as faint sediment and are occasionally legible. The Directorate has catalogued this sediment as a distinct class of submission.

The Fourteenth Concordance declares Rumour Cisterns unauthorized under any Concordance, a prohibition the Directorate has cited in eleven refusals to repair the shelves. A partial repair was nonetheless carried out in 604/6, and a note in the maintenance book records that the work was done off-hours, by persons not recorded, using a bucket. The shelves have since remained dry in all but the heaviest seasons.