Guild of Latent Curators

The Guild of Latent Curators is a chartered body of the Curators Guild concerned with the identification, registration, and custodial care of Potentialists — persons, objects, and apertures that have not yet become what they are tending toward. The Guild does not curate the thing; it curates the tendency. Its members are trained in the handling of materials that resist interaction, a discipline set out at length in the Manual of Reluctant Handling and examined annually by the Board of Unmet Contacts. The Guild's seat is the sub-basement annexe beneath Floor 112, though its registers are kept on Floor 112 proper, since the annexe has never been certified dry.

Foundation and charter

The Guild was constituted under Concordance 88, which distinguishes between a subject that is absent and a subject that is merely late. The distinction had been contested for some ninety years before the Concordance was promulgated, largely between the Curators of Lacunae, who held that an unfilled place was a subject in its own right, and the Guild's founders, who held that it was a subject in waiting. Concordance 88 ruled for the latter and granted the Guild a seal, a stipend, and the right to appoint two Assessors of Latency. The Lacunae chapter has never formally accepted the ruling; its position, restated in every recension of its house memorandum since, is that the Guild "catalogues the appetite and calls it the meal" (Curators of Lacunae, House Memorandum 12, clause 3).

The Guild's first Warden, Oris Fennick, spent his tenure compiling a register of Potentialists that he declined to complete, on the grounds that completing it would render them actual and thus outside his remit. The register remains open. It has been described by successive Wardens as "provisional," a designation the Guild has retained for four hundred and six years.

Doctrine of latency

The Guild measures latency in degrees, running from the first degree (a thing that could be otherwise but shows no sign of becoming so) to the ninth (a thing that has begun to become and cannot be safely observed without a second curator present). The scale is not linear. The Curators of the Still Air have twice petitioned for a tenth degree covering things that have already become but have not noticed, and the petition has twice been deferred to the Standing Committee on Unsettled Categories.

"A Potentialist is not a promise. A promise has a party. A Potentialist has only a direction, and frequently not that."

— Concordance 88, Annex 4, gloss on clause 9

Practically, the Guild's work consists in handling. Members are taught to approach an object along its least probable axis, to keep the hands still, and to speak to it only in the declarative. Trainees are warned against complimenting a Potentialist, which the Manual of Reluctant Handling records has caused three known premature actualisations, the most serious being the Incident at Stair 40-C, in which a junior curator's remark that a lacquered box "looked well today" resulted in the box becoming a small but fully furnished room.

The Register of Things Not Yet

The Guild's principal holding is the Register of Things Not Yet, a bound catalogue of some forty thousand entries, each recording a subject's present state, its apparent direction, and the date on which the Guild last confirmed that it had not changed. Entries are re-confirmed at intervals of seven years. Failure to re-confirm does not remove an entry; it marks it lapsed, which the Guild treats as a distinct condition requiring a separate form and, since Concordance 214, a separate fee.

The Register is not to be read aloud in the presence of its own subjects. This is stated plainly in the reading-room rules pasted inside the door, beneath a notice about the fire bucket.

Jurisdictional disputes

The Guild's relations with the Guild of Latent Structures are correct but cool. Structures claims all Potentialists that hold a load, the Latent Curators claim all Potentialists that could be otherwise, and the two definitions overlap in the case of every unfinished arch in the Tower. The Partition of 1402 assigned arches to Structures and archways to the Curators; the distinction has never been workable, and the Curators of Suspension have made a modest income arbitrating it.

A longer-running difficulty concerns the Guild of Latent Cartographers, which maintains that a Potentialist's direction is itself a place and thus subject to survey. The Latent Curators reject this on the grounds that a direction cannot be visited. The Cartographers have responded by visiting several.

Membership and current affairs

The Guild admits by examination and by attestation of nine years' handling. Its present Warden, Perrin Alsop, has held office since the winter of the Long Recension and has used it chiefly to argue that the Guild should be permitted to catalogue Potentialists it has not yet encountered. The Curators Guild has not ruled on the question. The Curators of Living Paradox, as a semi-autonomous oversight body within the Curators Guild, has noted that the proposal is either trivial or impossible and has asked to be informed which before it comments further.

The Guild's annexe on Floor 112 was flooded twice in the same season and the Register was moved upstairs, where it remains. Visitors are asked to wipe their feet.