Floor 5017

Floor 5017 is a lost-property and restitution floor situated between Floor 4001 and Floor 9,011, at a height that the survey parties of the Vertical Survey Office have never agreed upon in writing. It has been catalogued, disputed, inventoried, and restored, in that order and repeatedly. It is the only floor in the Tower whose holdings are, by definition, absent from it.

The floor consists of a single vaulted hall approximately 190 metres in length, divided into 2,614 numbered recesses. Each recess is empty. This is not an oversight of the maintenance rota, which attends Floor 5017 on the fourth Tuesday of every second month and which has filed no complaint. The emptiness is constitutive: the recesses of Floor 5017 receive the names and descriptions of items recovered elsewhere in the Tower and record their absence until the item is claimed. A recess with an object in it is regarded as a fault and is reported to the Bureau of Recess Integrity at once.

Origins and the Loss Register

Floor 5017 was constituted by the Twelfth Concordance, Annex 9, which established a central register for items mislaid in transit between floors — luggage, seals, appointment letters, and, in one continuing case, an entire junior Librarian last recorded entering the north stair at Floor 147. The Annex is two sentences long and has been amended thirty-one times without any of the amendments being read into the body of the text, so that the operative clause and its corrections now disagree as to whether the Register is kept by floor or by name.

The distinction is not academic. Keeping the Register by floor means the recesses are numbered according to where an item was lost; keeping it by name means they are numbered alphabetically after the loser. The Office of Recess Allocation has maintained both since 1,914, and the two systems have never been reconciled. Recess 1,102 is presently shared by a missing fire-bucket and a missing Deputy Warden, whose alphabetical positions coincide under the name Voss.

The Alder Voss Dispute

The most protracted controversy in the floor's history concerns the loss of the junior Librarian known as Alder Voss, who entered the north stair above the Containment Floor for Improbable Symmetries on the ninth of a winter the survey parties cannot agree on, carrying a sealed satchel and a travel pass endorsed at Floor 188. Voss did not arrive at Floor 5017. Voss did not arrive anywhere.

In 2,140 the Committee on Unsatisfied Deputies ruled that a person who cannot be found must be treated as an object mislaid, and opened a recess for Voss under the floor system. The Bureau of Recess Integrity objected on the grounds that the Bureau's charter covers chattels, and that a Librarian is neither chattel nor fixture, being "of a class not enumerated" (Bureau of Recess Integrity, memorandum to the Committee, 2,141). The Committee replied that the floor's holdings are absent by definition and that a person who is absent satisfies the definition more completely than a fire-bucket does. The memorandum is thirteen pages long. The last eight pages are a list of fire-buckets.

"An item is not more lost for being missed. The Register records absence, not affection."

— Bureau of Recess Integrity, Second Recession of 2,147, clause 3

Voss's recess remains open at position 1,102. It is swept weekly. It has been swept weekly since before the dispute began, which the Bureau regards as the strongest evidence in the file for its position and the Committee regards as irrelevant.

Restitution procedure

Claims are heard on the floor by the Clerk of Restitution, an office held since 1,988 by Ordinary Pel, whose tenure is the longest on record and whose appointment letter is itself entered in the Register as unclaimed. A claimant must state what was lost, where it was lost, and on whose authority it is now believed to be theirs. The third requirement is the source of most of the floor's business, because the authority must be cited from a Concordance, and the Twelfth Concordance and the Nineteenth Concordance have never agreed as to who may issue one. The Twelfth requires the endorsement of a Warden; the Nineteenth requires the endorsement of a Warden and forbids it.

Pel's practice, unrecorded in any instrument but observed without deviation since 2,203, is to accept whichever Concordance the claimant cites first and to note the citation in the margin in a hand that has grown steadily smaller. The margin of the Register for the year 2,390 is illegible.

Successful claims are recorded by striking the item from its recess and adding a line to the Restitution Ledger, a volume of 611 leaves bound in a material the Office of Binding declines to name. Unsuccessful claims are recorded in the same ledger, without comment, in a lighter ink. Visitors should note that the floor closes at the second bell regardless of whether a hearing is in progress, and hearings do not resume.

Relation to other floors

Floor 5017 is sometimes mistaken for a reversal floor, on the analogy of Floor 1117, where the direction of the stair is inverted. It is not one. Nothing on Floor 5017 is inverted; things are merely absent, which the Vertical Survey Office distinguishes carefully and the public does not. The confusion arose after Floor 4001 began forwarding all unclaimed items upward on the stated ground that Floor 5017 was "the floor where such things go", a formulation the Survey Office has twice asked it to withdraw.

The floor also receives from Floor 441 the annual return of items mislaid during the audit of that floor, a consignment of considerable size that Pel has described in correspondence as "the year's weather". No item so received has ever been claimed, which the Committee on Unsatisfied Deputies has taken as evidence of the absurdity of the arrangement and the Bureau of Recess Integrity has taken as evidence that the arrangement works.

Current inventory

As of the most recent return, the floor's standing entries include:

• Recess 41 — one episcopal glove, left-hand, recovered from the east landing of Floor 102.
• Recess 386 — a certificate of calibration issued by Floor 140 and returned uncollected.
• Recess 902 — the entire contents of a bounded storage recess displaced from Floor 87; the recess is listed, not the contents.
• Recess 1,102 — Alder Voss, junior Librarian, absent.
• Recess 2,009 — a Concordance, fourteenth recension, considered lost since the fire in the scriptorium and now considered found, which is disputed.

The last entry is the floor's only active controversy of the present decade. The Nineteenth Concordance holds that a document found cannot be entered as lost, while the Twelfth holds that a document lost and then found was lost, and that the Register is a record. The recess remains open. The document remains in it. Both are reported as faults, and neither has been swept.