Floor 300

Description

Floor 300 is an arithmetic floor of the Tower, catalogued principally for its holdings of unsummed quantities. It lies, according to the prevailing recension, between Floor 288 and Floor 312, and is administratively attached to the clerkship that also attends Floor 441 and Floor 449. The floor is a long gallery of counting-frames, floor-to-ceiling abaci, and slate tables at which figures are inscribed and, in the ordinary case, never totalled.

The Librarians describe Floor 300 as a place where quantities are held in a state of prior-to-total. Items arriving from lower floors are entered at one end of the gallery and depart, if they depart at all, at the other. The gallery measures 214 paces in length by 22 in width; the arithmetic standing at the west end has never been reconciled with that at the east, and both are considered correct.

History

The floor appears in the Fourth Concordance as a place of "arrested calculation", a designation it retained until the amendments of the Long Winter, at which point it was reclassified as a floor of "arrested conclusion". The distinction was raised in the Second Concordance by a clerk of the counting office who objected that a calculation arrested before its final bead is materially different from one arrested after. The objection was sustained, then reversed, then sustained again; the current standing of the matter is recorded in the annex to Floor 7α, which does not resolve it.

In the winter of the Sealed Frames, the keepers of Floor 300 sealed all counting-frames above the number nine, holding that any total requiring a tenth bead had already passed into the domain of another floor. The sealing lasted until the thaw and resulted in the loss of some forty-one standing computations, which were later recovered in an unsealed recension held at Floor 101.

Relation to Floor 102

Dispute persists as to whether Floor 300 is a subordinate annex of Floor 102 or an independent floor with no administrative tie to it. The Third Concordance treats the two as a single complex under a shared seal, while the later recension of the same document lists Floor 300 among the independent floors. Both readings have been cited in settlement of boundary questions; neither has prevailed for more than one Librarian's tenure.

The clerks who serve the floor have, in practice, drawn the boundary at the stair. Work begun on one side of the stair is not resumed on the other, and a figure carried across is treated as a new figure. This convention is not written in any Concordance, but it has held for as long as the current keepers can remember.

Holdings

The principal holdings are:

• the standing abaci of the East Gallery, some 1,200 in number, none totalled;
• the slate tables of the intermediate range, on which partial sums are inscribed and permitted to stand;
• the sealed frames of the upper tier, containing quantities withheld from reckoning by ordinance of the counting office;
• a single brass instrument of unknown purpose, referred to in inventories as the Remainder, which reports a value when queried and a different value on the following day.

Visitors are reminded that the frames are not to be touched while a computation stands, and that the Remainder answers only when no one is watching it directly.

See also

• Floor 232
• Floor 84
• Floor π
• Floor 2001