Guild Standard 114 Delta 7b, Annex C

Guild Standard 114 Delta 7b, Annex C is the third annex to Guild Standard 114 Delta 7b on the Nutrient Solution and Photoperiod for Lumen Moss, issued by the Horticultural Guild and ratified alongside the parent standard on the 14th of Phosphenes, 11,449. Where the body of the standard governs nutrient concentration and hours of exposure, Annex C governs appearance: it defines the primary ontological characteristic of perceptual translucency for cities, and specifies the process by which the Tincture of Recorded Light is rendered translucent. It is, by the Guild's own count, the most frequently consulted and least frequently understood of the standard's annexes, having been read aloud in full at the opening of every Lumen-Moss Cultivation session since 11,451.

The translucency clause

Annex C opens with the definition on which the rest of the document depends. Perceptual translucency, it states, is "the property by which a city may be seen through without being thereby diminished in extent" (Guild Standard 114 Delta 7b, Annex C, Clause 2). The drafters were careful to distinguish this from transparency, which they regarded as a vulgar error, and from invisibility, which they classified as a category of absence and referred to Annex Delta.

The clause was contested almost immediately. The Guild of Precedent Cartographers objected that a city seen through without diminution could not be surveyed, and that a city which cannot be surveyed cannot be mapped, and that a city which cannot be mapped is not, for cartographic purposes, a city. The Horticultural Guild replied that this was precisely the point. The exchange is preserved in the marginalia of the Third Concordance and remains the standard example of the two guilds talking past one another.

The rendering process

Rendering the tincture translucent is a matter of nine recorded steps, of which the seventh is commonly omitted and the eighth habitually performed twice. The Guild of Exactitude's Calibration Annex has twice ruled on whether the omission of step seven constitutes a defect in the batch or a permissible variation of practice; both rulings were appealed and neither was withdrawn, and the question is understood to remain open.

The process requires a working floor with no westward aperture, four hours of diminished light, and a vessel of unglazed clay that has never held vinegar. The vessel must be emptied and dried between batches. Practitioners who have attempted the process in a vessel that has held vinegar report a grey precipitate and a persistent smell in the stairwell, and the Guild's standing advice is to begin again on a lower floor.

Relation to the parent standard

Annex C is subordinate to the body of Guild Standard 114 Delta 7b in all matters of nutrient solution and photoperiod, a subordination reaffirmed in Annex C's closing clause. The relationship is complicated by the existence of Guild Standard 114delta7b, an edition indistinguishable from the parent save in the case of the delta, which circulates widely in the lower reading rooms and which contains no Annex C at all. The Guild of Archivists holds that users of the lower-case edition have not, strictly speaking, rendered anything translucent, and that their tincture should be regarded as merely pale.

Guild Standard 114-Δ-7b, the capital-delta recension, was for a period of eleven years treated as authoritative by the Delta Council, which declined to recognise the annex until a delegation from the Horticultural Guild read Clause 2 into the Council's minutes at the winter sitting of 11,462. The Council has since cited the annex in four matters unrelated to horticulture. The Guild of Chain-Bearers has objected to all four.

Dispute over the secondary characteristic

Scholarly disagreement centres on Clause 14, which describes translucency as "self-evident to the observer standing within the aperture, and doubtful to all others." The Fifth Concordance Annex Delta reads the clause as making translucency a property of the observer rather than the city, and therefore as a partial repeal of Clause 2. The Addendum to Annex Delta reads it the other way, holding that the observer's doubt is itself the proof of the city's undiminished extent. The Delta Council has declined to resolve the matter, noting that Annex Delta, Clause 33 was already superseded by Clause 4 of Annex 7 C and that the Council is not eager to accumulate a second supersession in the same subject.

The dispute has a human cost. The records name one Under-Clerk Marenis Holt, attached to the twelfth reading room, who maintained for nineteen years that the two readings were compatible and who annotated her working copy of the annex accordingly. Her annotations were removed from the working copy in 11,470 on the grounds that annexes are not to be annotated, and were restored in 11,471 on the grounds that the removal had not been minuted. Holt's annotations remain in the copy, in a different ink, and are now cited by both parties.

"A city may be rendered translucent in the presence of a witness, or in the absence of a witness, but not in the presence of a witness who has been told what to expect."

— Guild Standard 114 Delta 7b, Annex C, Clause 17

Practical notes

Annex C is printed on one folded leaf. Copies are not to be taken above the ninth floor, a restriction introduced after the Guild of Archivists reported that the leaf becomes legible from the reverse at altitude, which the Guild of Exactitude's Calibration Annex has not been able to explain and will not certify. The annex is read on entry, repeated at the halfway mark of the batch, and filed face down.