Font of Conditional Logic

The Font of Conditional Logic is a shallow stone basin on the 1,144th floor, fed by sealed conduit from the upper reservoirs, whose waters are held to confer provisional validity upon statements submerged in them. Unlike the Font of Forgetting, which removes, or the Font of Lost Quotations, which returns what was never cited, the Font of Conditional Logic does not alter a proposition's content. It alters its standing. A claim placed in the basin remains exactly as written and becomes, for a stated term, so long as.

The Font is administered jointly by the Division of Conditional Permissions and the Logic Guild, an arrangement set out in the Scroll of Conditional Elevations and periodically regretted by both. Its waters are not potable. Neither is the basin to be used for the rinsing of pens, a prohibition renewed each Recension and broken, on average, four times a decade.

Construction and the term of validity

The basin is circular, eleven feet six inches across, and cut from a single block of grey basin-stone quarried on Floor 902. The rim is incised at intervals of one handspan with the numerals I through XIV, corresponding to the fourteen standard terms of conditional validity enumerated in Annex VII of the Scroll of Foundational Logic. A statement submerged at mark III, for instance, holds its provisional standing for three days; one submerged at mark XIV holds for fourteen. Immersion beyond mark XIV is possible and has been done, but the resulting term is not recognized by any Concordance and is treated in practice as indefinite — a condition the Concordance on Indefinite Standing spent forty years attempting to abolish and succeeded only in renaming.

The water is replaced every ninth day by a party of four, two from each administering body, who must agree on the draw. The Physickers of the Deep Font have twice been asked to inspect the basin on the theory that its behaviour might resemble that of their own charges and have twice declined, noting in their reply of 6 Plantin that the Font of Conditional Logic "exhibits no moss, no resonance, and no mystery; it exhibits plumbing."

Procedure and the matter of the wet original

Immersion is performed by a sworn immerser in the presence of a clerk of the Division of Conditional Permissions, who records the text, the mark, the hour, and the depth. The text must be submitted in a single copy. This requirement has produced the Font's longest-running dispute: whether a document returned wet from the basin is the original, a copy, or a third thing.

The Logic Auditor holds that it is the original, since nothing was transcribed; the Logic-Sifters hold that it is a copy, since the water has touched it; and the Cadre of Aqueous Logic holds, in a marginal gloss of considerable influence, that it is neither until it dries, at which point it becomes whichever the reader requires. The Third Concordance, Annex 4, rules on the question as follows:

"A writing drawn from the Font shall be received in the condition in which it is drawn, and no party shall be heard to complain of damp."

— Third Concordance, Annex 4, clause 9

The ruling settled the pleadings and not the argument. Clerks in the sub-basement scriptoria still keep blotting-paper on the ledge beside the door, and a sign above it, lettered in the hand of an unnamed scribe, reads: Dry before filing.

The Syntactic Cascade of 1144

In the winter of the year recorded as 1144 — a coincidence of floor and date noted by every commentator and explained by none — a clerk named Ondrey Vasp submitted a single sheet bearing a nested conditional of his own composition, nineteen clauses deep, to be immersed at mark XII. The sheet was withdrawn on the ninth day. Within the hour the clauses began to fail, each releasing the next, in the manner the Division of Conditional Permissions terms a syntactic cascade failure. By evening the document had reduced itself to a single if and no conclusion, and the hall's index cards had begun to unfile themselves in sympathy.

Vasp's grievance, filed the same week and never withdrawn, argues that the Font performed correctly and the failure originated in the Vestigial Logic Engine, which had been left running overnight. The Division's finding of 1145 apportions no blame and recommends only that "nested submissions be immersed singly and at marks not exceeding VI" (Division of Conditional Permissions, Standing Order 22). Vasp was thereafter assigned to the Lexicon of Conditional Phrases and is credited there with eleven entries, including provided that, subject to, and a third he has spent thirty years trying to withdraw.

Dispute over origin

The Font's origin is contested. The received account, maintained by the Logic Guild, holds that the basin was carved in place and has always held water. A rival account, advanced by the Atlas of Interstitial Logic on the strength of two floor-plans of uncertain provenance, holds that the Font is not a basin at all but the lower aperture of the Font of Unwritten Definitions, and that what rises in it is not water but definition not yet fixed. The Physickers of the Deep Font, asked to arbitrate, replied that the two fonts share no mineral signature, no frequency, and no vocabulary, and that they would thank the Atlas to stop writing to them.

The question remains open. Pilgrims and petitioners descend to the 1,144th floor in considerable numbers, and the Guild has posted at the stairhead a notice, renewed annually, that the Font confers no standing on persons, only on statements, and that requests for the immersion of a petitioner's own name will be declined at the rail.