Floor 3174

Floor 3174 is a custodial and depositional floor occupying the seventh gallery of the middle spiral, catalogued under the Register of Named Floors as the Floor of Unclaimed Deliveries. Like its neighbours in the middle spiral, it is best located by reference to other floors rather than by counting: surveyors agree that Floor 3174 lies between Floor 288 and Floor 9,011, though the two hundred metres of stair between the lower landing and the sorting hall are recorded on the official plan as "present but uncounted" (Survey of the Middle Spiral, sheet 61). The floor employs four clerks and a hand-cart.

Function

Everything brought to the Tower by parties unknown — parcels with no sender, crates stamped with floors that do not appear in any register, letters addressed to offices abolished before the paper was milled — arrives at Floor 3174 for deposition. The floor does not open deliveries. Eleventh Concordance, Annex 9, is explicit on this point: a deposited article remains sealed "until a claimant shall present himself, or until the article itself shall speak in evidence of its owner" (Eleventh Concordance, Annex 9, clause 3). No claimant has ever presented himself. Nothing on Floor 3174 has ever spoken.

The sorting hall therefore holds some nine thousand sealed articles arranged by the year of their arrival and, within each year, by weight. The arrangement by weight is not sentimental. It was adopted in the winter of the Year of the Vellum Frost, when the floor's north shelving failed and the heavier crates, falling through the lighter ones, formed a heap that took eleven days to disassemble. Third Concordance, Annex 2, permits re-shelving after any structural failure provided the original order is "recorded, regretted, and abandoned" — a formula the clerks of Floor 3174 have had frequent occasion to use.

The hand-cart

The floor's single hand-cart is entered in the inventory of Floor 606 as equipment assigned to Floor 3174 and is not permitted to leave it. This restriction was formalised after the Affair of the Borrowed Cart in which a junior clerk, Sennet Vole, conveyed a sealed crate down to Floor 2001 in order to consult that floor's procedural registers on its behalf. Floor 2001 declined jurisdiction, having none over articles deposited elsewhere, and returned the crate and the clerk together. The ruling, issued as Twelfth Concordance, Annex 14, holds that a deposited article acquires the jurisdiction of the floor on which it rests and "carries that jurisdiction with it, like a stain"; consequently a cart bearing a deposited article is, for the duration of the journey, a fragment of Floor 3174 in motion, and must not be unloaded except on Floor 3174 itself. The cart has not left the floor since. It is required to be returned to the north wall by the end of each shift.

Dispute over the number

A long-running dispute concerns whether Floor 3174 should be numbered 3174 at all. The Concordance of Numbers, a summary document of disputed authority, records that the floor was named in the third recension by simple count from a now-lost lower landing, and that the count was later found to have omitted the reversal floor Floor 1117, whose peculiar geometry defeats ordinary ascent. On this reading the true number is 3173, and the floor has been operating under a designation one higher than its situation warrants for an unrecorded period.

The clerks of the floor maintain the designation on the grounds of Fifth Concordance, Annex 1, which provides that a number once entered in the Register is not disturbed by subsequent arithmetic. The Office of the Register has declined to rule, noting in a minute of 14 Veril that the question "is not one of fact but of endurance" (Office of the Register, Minute 2114/7). Signage on the landing still reads 3174, the lower digit having been re-painted at some expense after an attempt to alter it was ruled a defacement of the Register under Ninth Concordance, Annex 6.

Inventory

The floor's standing inventory, as certified at the last visitation, is short and is reproduced in full:

• Sealed articles of deposition: 9,014, arranged by year and weight.
• Shelving, north and south, the north section rebuilt and regarded as provisional.
• One hand-cart, restricted to the floor (see above).
• One stool, three-legged, assigned to the senior clerk.

Notes on visitation

Visitors are received at the lower landing and are asked not to lean on the north shelving, which has not been certified since the Vellum Frost. The senior clerk, Alder Quist, has held the post since the death of her predecessor and has twice requested a second stool, both requests having been refused on the ground that the floor's establishment provides for one. Her objection — that the establishment also provides for four clerks — is recorded in the minute book and unanswered.

The floor is not on any recommended route. Expeditions passing between Floor 288 and Floor 9,011 ordinarily take the outer stair and do not call here, which the clerks regard as correct and have said so in writing.