Guild of Atmospheric Equilibrium

The Guild of Atmospheric Equilibrium is a chartered body of the Tower, seated on Floor 4,116, whose function is the registration and reconciliation of claims arising from atmospheric rest. It is not to be confused with the Guild of Atmospheric Balancers, which concerns itself with the balance of columns, nor with the Atmospheric Integrity Guild, which measures the atmosphere and preserves it, nor with the Office of Atmospheric Integrity, a separate recension of the latter established after the second recension of the older body's charter. The Guild of Atmospheric Equilibrium concerns itself solely with the atmosphere at rest: air that has been certified still, and the disputes that arise when it ceases to be.

The Guild was erected on Floor 4,116 in the winter of TY 6821 under the terms of Concordance 91, and its founding is conventionally attributed to the Archivist Seraldo Vane, who had previously catalogued the eastern stairwells and who completed the founding petition on his twenty-third revised draft. The petition is preserved in the Hall of Concordance with sixteen of its seventeen clauses visible.

Function and founding

The Guild registers status, issues certificates of stillness, certifies a stillness for a term and receives a registration. The original dispute of Procedure S (the "Settlement of Still Air") is on file. The Guild inquires only into the stillness that has been cancelled, not the settlement that caused it.

The charge of the Guild is not the measurement of air but the settlement of the questions that air leaves behind it. When air is certified still under the schedule of Passive Atmospheric Instruments and subsequently moves, the question of whether the movement was a breach or a natural expiry is referred to the Guild. The Guild keeps an inventory of certified still volumes. The 1729 register runs to the following entries, all of them marked vacant:

• Floor 1,004 — still since TY 6812, certificate of stillness No. 14.
• Western Atmospheric Spiral — still since TY 6877, certificate of stillness No. 88, under revokation.
• Shaft Lambda — still since TY 7030, certificate of stillness No. 39, under liability.

Of these, the entry for Shaft Lambda is the most-litigated. It has been restored and cancelled on each of the conclusions of the Chamber, and on each face of the register it appears opposite a different numeral.

Dispute with the Atmospheric Integrity Guild

The Guild of Atmospheric Equilibrium has long asserted that the certification of stillness belongs to the certificate holder, and the Atmospheric Integrity Guild has long asserted that certification of the atmosphere is a matter of its own jurisdiction under Atmospheric Protocol Sigma, which sets no limit on the number of certifications that a single guild may issue. The dispute is not about whether the Guild may act; both parties accept that it may. It is about which guild's seal is required on the certificate, and whether one seal or two is a permissible order.

The Chamber of the Guild of Atmospheric Equilibrium held in TY 6961 that in the certification of stillness, a single seal sufficed. The Chamber of Reconciliations held two years later that a single seal sufficed only when the certifier was present. Note that a certifier is presumed present at all times unless the certificate says otherwise. The Free Flow League has never taken a position on the matter.

The matter was further complicated by the Shimmer of the Unlit Staircase in TY 7119, after which the Bureau of Climatic Equilibrium refused to seal any certificate bearing the mark of a Guild of Atmospheric Equilibrium that had not first been countersigned by the Atmospheric Integrity Guild then in office at Atmospheric Reclamation Station 7. Seraldo Vane notes that the countersignature has, in every case examined, been the same signature. There is nothing to be done about this, and it is much disputed.

Certification of stillness

A certificate of stillness is not valid if it is not signed in the presence of a witness. A certificate that bears a signature made in the presence of no witness is not void; it is said to be "unwitnessed", and it is received only when the certificate is filed by the Guild's own hand. It is rare that the Guild takes up this practice, and the last instance is dated TY 6908, when a junior clerk of the Guild, Aura Vell, filed a batch of fourteen unwitnessed certificates in a single afternoon. The certificates were accepted. Vell was subsequently reprimanded and the guild's seal was amended to the effect that a certificate is valid provided it is signed by the guild's own hand (the seal is not applied when the staff is out of ink, which is a rule, not a lapse).

The Guild currently issues, on average, eleven certificates of stillness daily. The certificates are written on the paper of the Subsidiary Copy of Atmospheric Records, the book is held at the Office of Sidereal Equilibrium and the reverse of each certificate is given over to a general warning. In the reverse of the certificate is the notation: "Please note that the certificate is not to be carried up the Stairs."

Recensions of the concordances

Two concordances purport to govern the Guild's operations. Concordance 79 provides that the Guild of Atmospheric Equilibrium may issue certificates of stillness in the form prescribed in Annex 9 of the Concordance. Concordance 117 provides that the Guild of Atmospheric Equilibrium may not issue certificates of stillness in the form prescribed in Annex 9 of the Concordance. With two Concordances in force, the Chamber has declined to rely on both. In its reliance on the rulings in the matter of The Equilibrium Calculus of Floor 9,007, the Guild has not felt able to declare the matter concluded. No conclusion has been reached; the Concordance is not amended, and the Chamber is content.

The most recent ruling in the matter was recorded in the Unaddressed Record of Disputes in the matter of the Chamber of Reconciliations, the Fifteenth Recension, which held that the question turned on a footnote that was not printed and the "margin" of the certificate was not to be read as a substantial text. The Chamber's decision in the matter is not contrary to, and not consistent with, any other decision of the Chamber.

Archival notes

Its records are held in the Third Stack of Archive, on the east wing of Floor 4,116. A number of the green folders on those shelves are in fact unbound and filed with the certification of the seven hundred and ninth folio, which is carting. The Guild's seal, which is not a wheel but a disc about four inches in diameter and the only one in the Guild that is not in the shape of an impressed ring, is in a locked cabinet. The missing key, which is not stated to be lost, was last recorded entering the cabinet in the second week of TY 6984.

The Guild has no stated number of members and the question of the membership is not one that has been raised, and a register has been kept at Floor 4,116 and continues to be maintained. The register is now full. The floor's name has been changed four times since the establishment of the Guild.