Floor 173

Floor 173 is a minor administrative and conciliation floor of the Tower, situated between Floor 84 and Floor 188 by the reckoning of the Standing Register, though several recensions of the Ninth Concordance place it instead between Floor 155 and Floor 202. The floor is best known as the seat of the Office of Unresolved Precedents and for the Settlement of 173, a compact concluded there in the winter of the year now cited in Tower reckoning as 173/4, which remains the governing instrument for disputes between floors that cannot agree on which floor they are on.

The floor is modest in extent — eleven stairheads, four galleries, and a single window facing inward — and its name, in the older designation used on the stair-plates, is the Level of Patient Reconciling. Visitors are asked to leave boots at the third landing.

Description and access

Floor 173 is reached by the inward stair from Floor 188 or by the service riser from Floor 113; the outward stair to Floor 155 was closed by the Concordance of Access in 219 and has not been reopened, although the door remains oiled. The floor's four galleries are arranged concentrically about the Hall of Quiet Precedents, whose ceiling is catalogued as a separate holding and may not be measured. The window faces inward, toward the well of the Tower, and is opened on the first day of each quarter by a duty clerk to admit air and to confirm that the well is still there. Both have always been confirmed.

The floor's climate is described in the Office's own returns as "temperate, with occasional rulings." Humidity is not recorded, on the grounds that it has never been asked about.

The Office of Unresolved Precedents

The Office of Unresolved Precedents occupies the second and third galleries and exists to hold precedents that cannot yet be applied, either because the floor on which they arose is disputed or because the dispute they arose from has not yet concluded. Nothing is discarded. By the Office's founding return of 219, the holdings numbered some four hundred items; by the audit of the present year they number one hundred and six thousand, of which an estimated eleven thousand concern a single disagreement between Floor 22.J and Floor 441 over the ownership of a corridor.

The Office is staffed by a body of clerks whose number is not stated in any return. Its longest-serving member, the Clerk of the Fourth Gallery, has held that post since before the settlement named for the floor was drafted and has twice declined promotion to Floor 202 on the grounds that the promotion would require him to leave the precedents.

"No precedent shall be applied until the floor on which it arose shall have agreed upon its own number."

— Settlement of 173, Article 2

The Settlement of 173 and its consequences

The Settlement of 173 was drafted to resolve a quarrel between Floor 84 and Floor 111 as to which of them was entitled to summon the other to audit. Its Article 2, quoted above, was intended as a procedural caution. It has since become the principal obstacle to the working of the Office, because the floors of the Tower are in near-permanent disagreement about their own numbers, and a precedent arising on a floor that has not settled its number can therefore never be applied. The Office continues, on the reasoning of the Third Concordance, Annex 9, to collect such precedents anyway, since a precedent that cannot be applied is still a precedent, and a precedent not yet collected is a gap.

The floor's name comes from this instrument. Before 173/4 it was catalogued only by number, and the stair-plates still read simply 173.

Dispute over position

The Standing Register, which follows the Second Recension of the Concordance of Floors, situates Floor 173 between Floor 84 and Floor 188. The Ninth Concordance, Annex 2, places it between Floor 155 and Floor 202, and a minority reading, advanced by the Surveyor of the Inner Stair and never formally adopted, places it "adjacent to Floor 19, at a distance to be determined." The Office has declined to rule on the question on the grounds that a ruling would itself become a precedent, and that a precedent arising on Floor 173 concerning Floor 173 could not be applied. The Librarians have been invited to settle the matter three times and have each time returned the invitation endorsed noted.

Measurements of the floor's extent differ accordingly. The figure of eleven stairheads is that of the Standing Register; the Ninth Concordance gives fourteen, and the minority reading declines to give a figure at all.

Holdings and inventory

The floor's own inventory, last revised in 219 and never since, reads:

• One hall, ceiling unmeasured.
• Four galleries, of which two are administered.
• One window, inward-facing, opened quarterly.
• Stair-plates, numbered by the Standing Register, bearing the floor's former designation.
• The Settlement of 173, in three copies, of which two disagree.

Visitors wishing to consult the third copy should apply to the Clerk of the Fourth Gallery in writing and should not expect a reply before the next quarterly opening of the window.