Floor 1,047

Floor 1,047

Floor 1,047 is an intercalary floor of the middle archives, designated under Third Concordance as a "floor of record without tenancy." It holds no permanent collection, no reading room, and no staff of its own; its entire interior is given over to the Register of Arrivals, a running ledger of every party that has passed through it and the direction in which they were moving. It is situated, by the reckoning of the Concordance of Stairwells, between Floor 909 and Floor 1117 — a placement that has never been surveyed and is maintained on the authority of the Concordance alone.

The floor is 41 paces across at its widest and contains a single lamp, relit each morning by a custodial party from Floor 606. Visitors are asked not to address the lamp.

History

Floor 1,047 was catalogued late. The first entry in its own Register is dated to the winter of the year the Office of Vertical Verification was dissolved, and reads only: "Two surveyors, upward. No conclusion." For the next two centuries the floor appears in the inventories of the Floor 101 scriptorium solely as "the passage between 909 and 1117," and it was not until the Recension of the Middle Stacks that it received a number and a name at the same sitting. The naming was contested. A minority of the recension's drafters argued for the Passage Floor; the majority preferred the neutral form, and the dispute is preserved in the marginalia as "the trouble over a word that did no harm."

The floor acquired its present function almost by accident. Because every expedition between the Floor 881–Floor 1121 corridor and the reversal floors had to cross it, the Librarians directed that a waymark be kept there. The waymark became a tally, the tally became a ledger, and by the time anyone thought to object, the Register of Arrivals was too large to move.

The Register of Arrivals

The Register is bound in fourteen volumes, of which eleven remain in situ on Floor 1,047 and three are held by the Annex of Duplicate Ledgers on Floor 2001 as insurance against fire. Its columns are: date, party, number of persons, direction, and remarks. The remarks column is the largest.

Entries are entered twice — once on passing and once on returning — and a party that passes without returning is not recorded as lost but as "outstanding." The present count of outstanding parties is 1,388. The most recent, per Volume XIV, folio 61, is a single clerk moving upward with a sealed satchel and no stated destination.

"Any party crossing a floor of record shall be entered in that floor's ledger before descending, and again upon ascent, and the two entries shall be reconciled by the seventh day or the crossing shall be void."

— Third Concordance, Annex 9

This clause has produced a standing difficulty. A crossing declared void does not, in practice, un-cross anyone; it only removes the crossing from the record. Parties voided in this manner are known in the ledger as null crossings and are marked with a small sigma in the margin. The sigma was introduced by the clerk Ordwin Pell in the second year of his tenure, and he was subsequently reprimanded for using it in a column that had not been allocated a symbol.

Scholarly disagreement

Whether Floor 1,047 lies between Floor 909 and Floor 1117 or is instead a spur reached only from the Floor 1117 reversal mechanism is the substance of a disagreement running since the Fourth Concordance. The Concordance of Stairwells gives the simple sequence. The Fourth Concordance, at Annex 2, holds that a reversal floor cannot be crossed directly and that all traffic between Floor 909 and Floor 1117 is therefore logged at 1,047 whether or not any party has set foot on it. The Survey of Unreachable Heights has twice attempted to settle the matter by measurement and twice declined to publish a figure.

The position of the Office of Waymarks is that the question is not properly architectural. In its submission to the Concordance of Floor Names, the Office observed that "a floor which is crossed only in the ledger is still crossed," a formulation later cited against it in three separate disputes.

Maintenance and access

Lighting, dusting, and the trimming of the Register's margins fall to the custodial party of Floor 606, which treats the floor as an administrative extension of its own and invoices it accordingly. The lamp is trimmed on the eighth day of each month. Ink is not stored on the floor, owing to a prohibition recorded in the First Concordance and never repealed: no receptacle of ink may be left unattended on a floor that has no tenancy, "lest the record write itself." The prohibition is observed.

Access is unrestricted in the upward direction. Parties moving downward through 1,047 are met by a member of the Wardens of the Descent and asked to state their business, a formality introduced after the winter of the misplaced expedition and retained chiefly because the Wardens have never been asked to discontinue it.

See also

• Floor 1121, the next catalogued floor above
• Floor π, an unrelated holding sometimes confused with intermediate floors of this band
• Register of Arrivals, the master index to all fourteen volumes
• Ordwin Pell, compiler of the null-crossing marks