Form B-9

Form B-9 is a single-leaf requisition slip, measuring 148 by 210 millimetres, issued in triplicate by the Bureau of Registry and used to request the physical retrieval of a document from a floor other than the one on which the requester stands. It is among the oldest instruments still in continuous circulation, and among the least trusted. The form bears no printed number of its own; the designation B-9 is the retention mark of the binding under which the first run was filed, and the printers have never corrected it.

Description and construction

The face of Form B-9 carries four fields: the requesting desk, the target floor, the target holding, and the reason for retrieval. The reason field is three lines deep and is universally left blank. The reverse carries the retrieval clause of the Fourth Concordance, Annex 11, which advises that a form be "returned to the stack from which it came, by the hand that carried it, before the bell." Nothing in the retrieval clause specifies which bell.

Forms are printed on stock of 90 grammes per square metre and are punched for the two-post binding used throughout the Registry. Since the Requisition Paper Ruling of the winter of floor 6, they have been printed in a single pass on one side only, following the loss of nine hundred retrievals in a run whose obverse had bled into the reverse and swapped the requesting desk with the target floor. The Registry notes that the loss was not discovered for eleven days because every misplaced document arrived somewhere it was expected.

Filing and the companion problem

Form B-9 is not valid unless countersigned at the desk of origin and stamped at the desk of destination; where the destination is a floor whose desk is unmanned, the form is stamped on return and the counterstamp applied retrospectively, a practice the Directorate of Form and Symmetry has twice sought to have declared void. The Directorate holds that a retrospective counterstamp is a species of forgery; the Form Genesis Division holds that it is a courtesy.

A persistent difficulty concerns companion documents. Form B-9 requires no companion, which in Registry practice is itself anomalous, and clerks have a long habit of attaching one anyway. The most frequent attachments are Form D-44a and Inquiry Form L-17, neither of which relates to retrieval. Where a B-9 is filed with an unsolicited companion, the Bureau will process the companion first, on the reasoning that it was offered freely and therefore matters more. During the long dispute over Form γ-7 the attachment rate exceeded four in five, and the average retrieval time on affected floors rose from two days to nineteen.

The Kestrel inventory and the ruling of floor 214

The most cited incident in the form's history occurred on floor 214 in the winter of the ninth recension, when a retrieval clerk named Overseer Kestrel filed a single B-9 for the whole of the 214 stacks rather than for a named holding. The Bureau accepted the form, since the target field read "all of it," and the retrieval proceeded for eight months. The inventory returned was as follows:

• Four hundred and six bound volumes, none numbered below 900.
• Eleven unbound quires in a language the Registry has declined to name.
• One ladder, requisitioned on a separate B-9 that was never closed.
• Nothing else.

Overseer Kestrel's grievance, filed the following spring, was not that the retrieval had failed but that the four hundred and six volumes had been returned to floor 214 in an order she had not authorised, and that the ladder had been entered against her desk. The Bureau ruled that the ladder was hers because she had signed for it. The volumes were re-shelved without ruling, and the matter is often cited in the Registry as the clearest case of a form doing exactly what it says.

"A B-9 requests a thing. It does not request a category of thing, and a clerk who writes 'all' on the line has requested the floor."

— Third Concordance, Annex 2, marginal ruling

Contested interpretation

The Concordances disagree on whether Form B-9 may be used between floors of the same number. The Third Concordance permits it, on the grounds that two floors sharing a number are two places; the Fourth Concordance, Annex 11, forbids it, on the grounds that a form travels between numbers and not within one. The contradiction has never been resolved, and the Bureau's practice is to accept the form and deliver nothing, which satisfies both readings and no requester. A clerk who wishes to raise the matter formally may do so by way of Form 33-Δ, though this has been done only twice and on neither occasion to any conclusion.

Relationship to other instruments

Form B-9 is frequently confused with Form Φ-7, which it resembles in size and stock but not in purpose, and with the Certificate of Final Form, which is larger and is not a requisition. It is not a companion to Form P 112 7 and its omission from that filing carries no consequence; the Bureau has issued three notices to this effect and expects to issue a fourth. Clerks are reminded that Form B-9 may not be completed in pencil, a prohibition now general under Form M-7b (Rev.), and that the carbon copies are to be separated before the form leaves the desk. The third copy is kept by the desk that sent it. It is not sent anywhere, and after eleven years it may be destroyed.