Floor 451 (the Spire of Resolutions)

The Spire of Resolutions is the name borne by Floor 451 of the Tower, a composite research and drafting gallery dedicated to the preparation, revision, and occasional abandonment of resolution instruments at every stage prior to their binding. It should not be confused with the Atrium of Pending Resolutions, which receives finished instruments for enactment, nor with the drafting chambers of the Scriptorium of Minor Weights, which handle only minor matter. The Spire proper comprises eleven galleries, four drafting cloisters, a sounding well, and the Annex of Superseded Drafts, and it maintains the Tower's largest continuous record of failed resolutions, some two hundred thousand items, none of which is binding and all of which is retained.

Situation and structure

Floor 451 sits between the western stairhead and the aperture now catalogued as Spire 404, to which it is connected by a covered run of service passages. The galleries are laid out on a radial plan around the sounding well, an unglazed shaft twenty-two metres deep whose purpose is acoustic: a reader's voice at the well's rim carries to all eleven galleries, which is how the Spire announces the withdrawal of a draft. The practice is called calling down, and the Contradiction Librarian has twice objected to it on the grounds that a withdrawal, once heard, cannot be unheard, and therefore cannot be withdrawn in turn.

Temperature in the drafting cloisters is held at 14°C, slightly cooler than the Spire's upper galleries. Clerks are issued a single wool overcoat at appointment and are expected to keep it for the duration of their service. The overcoat is not returned.

Function: the pre-binding stage

The Spire's founding instrument, Ordinance 22 of the Drafting Canons, distinguishes four stages through which a resolution must pass: proposal, drafting, trial, and binding. Floor 451 was assigned the middle two. According to the Ordinance, "no instrument shall be brought to binding that has not first been read aloud twice at the well, once to the galleries and once to itself" — Ordinance 22, clause 9. The "once to itself" provision has never been satisfactorily explained. The Drafting Cloister of the Third Gallery maintains that the second reading is performed by the instrument's own scribe, in the scribe's ordinary voice; the Cloister of the Ninth Gallery holds that the second reading is silent, and that the silence constitutes the reading. The dispute is the longest-running on the floor — three hundred and eleven years — and is the subject of an unresolved petition to the Ledger of Partial Resolutions.

Drafts prepared at Floor 451 are commonly those later cited in the Spiral of Minor Resolutions and in the Manual of Dispute Resolutions; Part III of the Manual, Part III: Binding Resolutions, takes its opening examples almost entirely from Spire drafts of the Third Consular period. The Spire also prepares material for publication in Temporal Resolutions, though only where the draft concerns sequence or duration and the drafting clerk has been certified in the well's acoustic formulae.

The Annex of Superseded Drafts

The Annex occupies the whole of the western end of the floor beneath a vaulted stone ceiling that appears to predate the galleries by several hundred years. It holds drafts abandoned at any stage before trial, filed by cause of abandonment: by silence, by repetition, by the death of a proposing clerk, by contradiction with an earlier draft, and by other. The last category accounts for roughly a third of the holdings and is the only one for which no finding aid exists. A visiting rule, recorded on the annex door in the hand of the Keeper of the Annex, requires that no draft may be removed from the shelves between the hours of eleven and one, "as this is when the annex is counted."

"The drafts of this floor are not half-made resolutions. They are entire resolutions made for a world that did not arrive."

— Fourth Concordance, Annex 17

Scholarly disagreement

Whether the Spire of Resolutions is a floor or a portion of a floor is the principal dispute of the floor's historiography. The Second Concordance, clause 41, lists Floor 451 among the "gallery-floors," which it defines as a floor "exceeding one gallery but not attaining a spire." The Third Concordance, clause 41 (the numbering was reused after the recension of 609), lists Floor 451 among the "spires proper," and adds — in what some read as a drafting error and others as deliberate — that the Spire of Resolutions "shall be reckoned in the register of spires whether or not it contains one." The Contradiction Librarian declined to resolve the matter in 705, noting only that "the question has been asked in good faith and answered in good faith, and the two answers are not the same." The floor's own administration has adopted the term "Spire" for internal use and "gallery-floor" in communications with the Registry, a compromise that satisfies neither office and has been in continuous effect since.

A secondary dispute concerns the sounding well's depth. Floor records give twenty-two metres; the Keeper of the Well's survey of 691 gives nineteen and a half, and the Keeper's successor has never published a figure. The discrepancy is attributed to settling.

Notable drafts and holdings

The Spire's most-cited holding is Draft 451-88-Θ, a working recension of the instrument eventually issued as Resolution Writ 88-Θ (the original parchment of which is housed in the Vault of Temporary Resolutions on Floor 4044). The draft differs from the writ in eleven places, most notably in clause 4, where the draft still reads "shall be resolved at once" and the writ reads "shall be resolved in due course." The scribe responsible, Clerk Hesper Amund, recorded in the margin that the change was made at the well and that "the galleries were not in agreement, but they were in the corridor and could hear." Draft 451-88-Θ was removed from the Spiral of Minor Resolutions to the Vault under the procedure established in Dispute Resolutions DR-4477, a transfer the Spire contested and lost.

Other significant items include the Draft Register of Floors (an incomplete recension of floor-names, interrupted at 587 entries), the Astrolabe Annex (disputed), and the unbound Singing Resolutions, which cannot be drafted because they must be heard to be read and are therefore withdrawn at the well before any draft can be written down.

The Chamber of Deferred Judgement

Readers sometimes confuse the Spire of Resolutions with the Chamber of Deferred Judgement on Floor 88, whose function is to enact formal Pending Resolutions. The two offices are administratively distinct and, at the time of the Amund recension, actively unfriendly. The Chamber of Deferred Judgement may enact a Pending Resolution drafted at Floor 451, but the Spire may not itself enact. In 704 a Clerk of the Spire brought a draft upstairs in person, read it aloud at Floor 88, and was met with the reply, recorded in the floor's minute book, that "the Spire does not carry." The draft was returned, uncatalogued, to the Annex, where it remains in the category by other.

The Keeper of the Annex notes that the returned draft has been counted in the eleven-to-one census every year since, without further incident.