Gall-Infused Archive Water

Gall-Infused Archive Water is the collective designation for any standing or circulating water within the Tower that has absorbed sufficient gall compounds to serve as a recording medium. It is classified as a fluid holding rather than a component, a distinction upheld repeatedly in the Sixth Concordance and contested in the Eleventh Concordance, and it is catalogued in the Index of Internal States under the subheading "waters that remember." Its defining property is mnemonic: a volume of Gall-Infused Archive Water that has been properly darkened will retain the impressions of documents written above it, and will yield those impressions again, faintly and in order, when decanted under prescribed conditions.

Formulation and occurrence

The infusion results from the slow migration of tannins from shelving into standing water. Shelving from the Dogmatic Quarries is the principal donor; its green timber releases ferrous and gallotannic compounds at a rate that the Quarry Moisture Tables give as one part in eleven thousand per decade, though the tables are acknowledged to be estimates. Water so darkened acquires the colour of weak tea and a pronounced astringency that is noted in every surveyor's report and mentioned in no administrative document.

It is distinct from Void-Gall and from Ferrous Gall Ink in both origin and use. The former is a clarified binder mandated for the demarcation of Sentinel Void perimeters; the latter is a prepared ink of ferrous sulphate, crushed oak gall, and rendered tallow. Archive water is neither prepared nor mandated. It is merely present, and it is collected.

Where the water pools — notably in the Sump of First Want and along the lower courses of the West Spiral Stairwell, Floor 302 — it is drawn off at intervals fixed by Ordinance 1,441 on Standing Waters and transferred to square glass vessels for decantation. The vessels are stoppered, labelled, and shelved in the dark. Stoppers are to be numbered, not lettered, since the lettering incident in the Decanting Hall of the Third Landing.

The Refraction Incident of Floor 302

Gall-Infused Archive Water passed from curio to instrument in the winter following the Winter of Standing Water, when the stairwell on Floor 302 flooded to a depth of some forty centimetres and remained flooded for nine days. When the water was drawn off, the scribes of the Office of Diligent Transcription observed that it had taken up the text of a notice posted two landings above — not an image of the notice, they were careful to specify, but the notice itself, legible and complete and in the wrong hand.

The Office's preliminary report was referred to the Librarians and returned with a single annotation: "Confirm that nothing was added." The confirmation took eleven months. What the surveyors ultimately established was that the water had not copied the notice but remembered it, in the manner of a slow witness, and that the memory could be extracted by decantation onto unsized vellum. The resulting impressions are catalogued as Refractive Citations and are admissible in disputes concerning documents that have since been destroyed.

An earlier and much-contested instance is recorded in the survey of Gall's Pocket, where a non-standard ink was linked to volumetric discrepancies in a sealed cistern and set the precedent under which all later gall-formulations, including Void-Gall, have been assessed. The Office of Diligent Transcription maintains that the Pocket survey was a survey of a cistern and nothing more; the Bureau of Sealed Volumes has never accepted this.

Use in testimony

Because a volume of archive water can be made to yield impressions in sequence, the Tower has adopted it as a secondary witness in matters where written records disagree. Procedure is governed by the Sixth Concordance, which holds that water drawn from beneath a document is competent to speak to that document's contents, and by the Eleventh Concordance, which holds that it is not, on the ground that a fluid cannot swear.

"A volume decanted in the presence of the parties shall be received as to sequence only, and not as to intent, and not at all if the stopper has been lettered."

— Eleventh Concordance, Annex 7

That both Concordances remain in force is not regarded as a difficulty. Clerks of the Office of Diligent Transcription resolve it in practice by decanting twice: once under the Sixth and once under the Eleventh, and entering whichever account is shorter. M. Kael has objected to this in writing on four occasions, on the ground that the shorter account is not reliably the truer one. The objection is filed.

Properties and mishandling

Archive water is stable in the dark and deteriorates rapidly in light. It must not be decanted in a north-draft, as the draught oxidises the ferrous fraction and can induce Marlboric Yearning in those standing close to the vessel — an effect first described in the Vellum Treatment Notes and never fully explained. Exposure also shortens the memory of the water: an hour of direct lamplight is held to erase approximately one shelf-length of text.

Vessels are therefore stored on the north side of the Decanting Hall of the Third Landing, unlit, and are inspected quarterly for cracking. A cracked vessel is not repaired. The water is returned to the floor from which it was drawn, and the floor is entered in the Ledger of Damped Echoes as having been put back.

It is also used in the manufacture of recording media: Gallstone Ink is prepared by steeping Mnemonic Tape in archive water reduced to a third of its volume, and Xi is constructed from tape so treated. The reduction is performed by the Provisioner Caste, who hold the sole licence for it and who have raised the price once, in a year no one will name.

Scholarly disagreement

Whether a body of archive water retains impressions of documents written above it, or only of documents shelved beside it, has been open since the Pocket survey. The Bureau of Sealed Volumes maintains the horizontal doctrine — that the water remembers what stands over it — and cites the Floor 302 flood, where the notice was two landings up and yet was clearly received. The Office of Diligent Transcription maintains the lateral doctrine, arguing that the notice was at some point carried horizontally along the landing and that the water received it from a bearer, not a height.

The dispute has produced two catalogues of refractive impressions that do not agree, and a standing instruction that no bearer be named in either. It has also produced the question that the Reconciliation of the Wandering Stacks was convened to settle and did not: if the water remembers by proximity, then every vessel in the Decanting Hall is remembering something, and the Tower has not decided whether it wishes to know what.

Practically, the question is rarely urgent. The water is drawn, darkened, stoppered, and shelved; it is consulted when a document is missing and otherwise left alone. The Index of Internal States records 1,412 vessels in good standing and eleven unaccounted for, the latter entered without comment in the hand of a clerk who is no longer on the floor.