Floor 707 (The Whispering Gallery)

Floor 707 (The Whispering Gallery) is the seven hundred and seventh floor of the Tower insofar as floor numbers may be predicated of it, and is catalogued among the subsidiary auditory annexes of The Whispering Gallery. It is not to be confused with Floor 117, Floor 899, or Floor 14,112, all of which maintain separate acoustic registers. Floor 707 is chiefly noted for the extreme delay of its returns and for the Whispering Gallery Precedent, which was argued there in the winter of the year the stacks were recatalogued and has governed the floor's administration ever since.

Location and access

Floor 707 is reached by the Whispering Stair, though only from the descending side; ascents arrive at Floor 22 regardless of the tread selected, a circumstance first recorded by the survey party of Clerk Amarin Voss and never satisfactorily explained. The floor also intersects the primary stack near the subsidiary access described in Whispering Gallery of Floor Ξ-12, and surveyors have on three occasions logged the same corridor from both approaches on the same morning, which the Census of the Whispering Stacks treats as duplication rather than error.

The floor's own register records two hundred and eleven bays, of which one hundred and ninety-four are audible. The remaining seventeen are sealed under Concordance 44 and may be entered only for the purpose of returning a borrowed umbrella.

The delay

A whisper spoken in Bay 3 of Floor 707 is returned, in the speaker's own voice and with the speaker's own inflections, at a measured interval of eleven days, four hours, and some minutes the survey has never fixed precisely enough to print. The floor does not amplify; it holds. The Whispering Gallery Procedural directs that all returns be logged on the day of utterance and reconciled on the day of arrival, which has produced the floor's characteristic filing pattern: two ledgers, eleven days apart, kept by two clerks who are forbidden to meet.

The returns are not always verbatim. In a well-attested instance from the ninth year of the present recension, a query concerning the whereabouts of a missing annex came back as an answer, correct in every particular, to a question the clerk had not yet thought to ask. The Case of the Whispering Gallery cites the episode without comment.

The Whispering Gallery Precedent

The floor's governance derives from the Whispering Gallery Precedent, which held that a return belongs to the floor and not to the speaker, and that the speaker may therefore not be compelled to hear it. The ruling was intended to settle a dispute between the Keepers of the Seventh Bay and the Office of Audible Returns; it settled that dispute and created a larger one, since the Office maintains that a return which is not heard cannot be said to have occurred, and has declined to enter eleven days of Floor 707's ledger into the general reckoning since. Both positions are supported by annexes of the Whispering Gallery Procedural, cross-filed with Re: The Whispering Gallery of Floor 112, Annex B for reasons the archive has never made clear.

"A voice may be held without being kept, and kept without being owed."

— Whispering Gallery Precedent, ruling of the presiding Librarian, clause 6

Scholarly disagreement

Authorities divide on whether Floor 707 is properly a gallery at all. The Seventeenth Concordance lists it among the subsidiary annexes and describes its function as "receptive and deferred" (Annex 3, clause 11). The Twenty-Second Concordance, drafted some decades later and never reconciled with its predecessor, classifies the floor as a vestibule, on the ground that a gallery implies a passage through and nothing on Floor 707 passes through in under eleven days. The Office of Audible Returns has adopted the vestibule reading; the Keepers of the Seventh Bay have not. Clerk Voss, whose survey remains the fullest account, declined to take a position and was reprimanded for it under an instrument since repealed.

A third party, the compilers of the Census of the Whispering Stacks, evade the question by counting Floor 707 twice — once as gallery, once as vestibule — and noting the discrepancy in a footnote of admirable brevity.

Adjacent holdings

Floor 707 is architecturally contiguous with the Gallery of Unenacted Laws on its eastern face and shares a stairhead with the Barometric Gallery, whose instruments record no pressure change when the door between them is opened. The Silent Banner of the Whispering Galleries was carried through Floor 707 in the year of the recataloguing and left no acoustic trace, a fact cited in the Whispering Gallery of Gtmgedelta as evidence that the banner's silence is a property of the banner and not of the floor.

Visitors are reminded that whispers may be lodged at the desk in Bay 1 and collected from Bay 3, and that lodgings left uncollected for one year are read aloud in the annex and then struck from the register.