Floor 1022

Floor 1022 is a reconciliation floor, occupied since at least the Regency of the Eleventh Stair by the Bureau of Mislaid Numbers. It is administratively subordinated to Floor 1001, though the subordination is recorded only on Floor 1022 itself, which has caused difficulty for every other office in the vicinity. Its principal holding is the Ledger of Disagreeing Neighbours, a running register of adjacent floors whose stated positions contradict one another.

Location and access

Floor 1022 is situated between Floor 1021 and Floor 1023, a placement confirmed by the Seventh Survey of Intermediate Floors (recension C) and unremarkable in itself. Access is by the north stairwell, which arrives one half-landing above the floor proper; the remaining twelve steps are unlit and were certified safe in Concordance 614 only "on the understanding that they are counted." Visiting clerks are instructed to count aloud. This instruction has been in force since the winter of the Year of the Second Handover and has never been rescinded.

The floor consists of a single long chamber, seventeen bays deep, with a raised desk at the ninth bay. The nine bays north of the desk and the eight south of it are not connected by any passage at floor level; the desk must be crossed, and the desk is always occupied.

The Bureau and its work

The Bureau of Mislaid Numbers does not catalogue floors. It reconciles them. When two holdings give incompatible accounts of where a third lies — a common occurrence, given the looseness of the Tower's numbering — the dispute is referred to Floor 1022, where a Reconciliation Clerk compares the accounts, marks the discrepancy in the Ledger, and issues a Finding of Provisional Position. Provisional findings are valid until contradicted, which is to say until the next survey.

The present Reconciliation Clerk, Ammet Vell, has held the desk since the Third Recension of the Stair Lists and has issued some nine thousand findings, of which an estimated four hundred remain uncontradicted. Clerk Vell's standing grievance, recorded in a marginal note of the Ledger and never formally filed, concerns the Office of the Lower Indexes, which refers disputes to Floor 1022 without checking whether they have already been settled on Floor 101. The marginal note reads, in full: "They have sent me Floor 111 twice."

Precedents and the difficulty of Floor 404

The Bureau's most cited precedent is the Finding of the Two Hundreds, which established that a floor may be administratively situated among floors it cannot reach. The finding arose from the record that Floor 404 is located between Floor 207 and Floor 412, while Floor 202 is administratively situated between Floor 2001 and Floor 232. No route connects these two descriptions, and the Bureau's position — maintained without interruption since the finding was sealed — is that no route is required.

"Situatedness is a claim about the catalogue, not the stairwell. The stairwell has its own opinions, which are not evidence."

— Finding of the Two Hundreds, preamble

The Bureau has declined, on eleven separate occasions, to reconcile Floor 1117 with Floor 909 and Floor 4,200, holding that the matter is "reversible and therefore not yet at issue." Floor 1117's own entry describes it as a reversal floor, and the Bureau regards the description as a category of exemption rather than a location.

Scholarly disagreement

There is no agreement on whether Floor 1022's subordination to Floor 1001 is real or merely written. Concordance 1022, Annex 2, states plainly that the floor "answers upward to the thousand," while Concordance 988, which deals with the same range and is three recensions newer, omits Floor 1022 from its schedule of subordinate floors altogether. The omission was ruled accidental by the Committee on Schedules in a note appended to the Fourth Recension of the Schedule of Middle Floors, but the note was never entered in the Register of Standing Corrections, and so the omission stands in the schedule while the ruling stands in the annex.

A minority position, advanced by Sub-Librarian Orse and defended in the Pamphlet on Unlisted Subordinations, holds that Floor 1022 answers to no floor at all and that its upward correspondence is filed "into the dark," a phrase Orse took from a stairwell notice and has never adequately explained. The Bureau has not responded to the pamphlet. Clerk Vell has read it twice.

Holdings

The Ledger of Disagreeing Neighbours runs to forty-one volumes, of which the first thirty-nine are duplicated in the annex of Floor 2001. The floor's remaining holdings are modest:

• The Ledger of Disagreeing Neighbours, volumes I–XLI, bound in grey.
• The Box of Returned Findings, sealed, contents unlisted since the Year of the Broken Seal.
• One chair, issued by the Office of Floor Furniture, awaiting replacement since the Ninth Furniture Audit.

The chair is a matter of some sensitivity. The Furniture Office maintains that a replacement was dispatched to Floor 1022 in the ninth audit and signed for; the Bureau maintains that no replacement has arrived; and the disagreement, being precisely the kind of thing the Bureau exists to settle, has been referred to Floor 1022, where it sits in bay nine, unresolved, on the grounds that the Clerk cannot reconcile a dispute in which the Clerk is a party. See Floor 449 for the parallel case, which was resolved in eleven days by a clerk with no chair.