IAP-Γ-451

IAP-Γ-451 is the four hundred and fifty-first entry of the Gamma series in the Index of Ambiguous Precedents, and the only entry in that series to have generated a subordinate bureau. It is titled, in the register hand of the Clerk of Precedents, The Precedent of the Second Counting, and it governs the treatment of any quantity in the Tower that has been tallied twice and returned two different answers. It is a Subsidiary Guidance Document, non-binding, and is cited more often than any other Gamma entry excepting IAP-Γ-12, which concerns itself with stairwells that are counted as floors and is not relevant here.

Origin and ratification

IAP-Γ-451 was entered into the Index on the eleventh of a month the record does not name, during the two hundred and ninth session of the Judicial Precedent Guild's drafting chamber. Its occasion was a dispute over the fourth-floor landing census, in which two enumerators working the same landing on the same afternoon returned counts of thirty-one doors and thirty doors respectively. Neither would yield. The Concordance of Administrative Conclusions ratified the entry in its forty-first sitting, the same sitting that ratified IAP-Ω-7, and for the same procedural reason: the chamber could not agree which count was correct and preferred to legislate the disagreement rather than resolve it.

The ratified text holds, in its operative clause, that where two lawful counts of the same thing disagree, the disagreement is itself the finding, and the number to be entered in the Central Registry of Precedents is neither count but the interval between them. For the fourth-floor landing this interval is one door. The door in question has never been located, and the landing has been entered as carrying thirty doors and one interval continuously since.

The interval, and the Office of the Interval

By 1404 the Registry had accumulated so many intervals that a dedicated office was raised to keep them. The Office of the Interval occupies a single room on a floor whose number is itself disputed — the Bureau of Registry has entered it as Floor 88 and the Cartographic Corps as Floor 87 and a half, and IAP-Γ-451 has been applied to the disagreement rather than to the floor. The Office keeps the Interval Ledger, in which intervals are recorded by width, by subject, and by the names of the two enumerators whose counts produced them. Enumerators whose disagreements have been entered three times are entitled to a joint seal. Enumerators whose disagreements have been entered eleven times are separated by corridor assignment and are not informed why.

"The interval is not an error. An error is a single count wrongly taken. The interval is two counts rightly taken, and the Office exists to prevent either of them from being preferred."

— Interval Ledger, frontispiece, unsigned, dated to the office's founding year

Not all intervals can be kept. Where an interval exceeds the total of either count — a thing that occurred on Floor 212 in the winter of 1409, when two enumerators returned eleven and nine and the interval was entered as fourteen — the entry is referred to the Department of Ambiguous Metrics for recomputation, which has not yet returned a result on the Floor 212 interval and is not expected to.

The Ledger schism

The chief difficulty in the article's history is the question of whether the Interval Ledger is one document or two. In 1441 the Office of the Interval was expanded, and a second copy of the Ledger was begun so that the original need not leave the room during consultations. By 1450 the copies had diverged in four hundred and six entries. The Court of Unseen Precedents was asked to determine which was authoritative and, applying IAP-Γ-451 to the Ledger itself, ruled that the interval between the two copies was the finding and that neither copy should be preferred.

The Office of the Interval has accordingly maintained both copies ever since, and a third since 1512, in order to keep an interval between the interval. The practice is defended in the Office's standing memorandum as "consistent with the precedent, and cheaper than a fourth copy." Scholars who object that the precedent now applies to itself without termination are directed by the memorandum to Annex C, which is a single sentence: "The precedent applies to itself. Do not attempt to apply it to its application to itself."

Scholarly disagreement

The principal dispute concerns what IAP-Γ-451 actually holds. The Advisory Precedents school maintains that the entry's operative clause is narrower than its title — that it governs tallies of doors and apertures only, and that its extension to ledgers, corridors, and enumerator seals was an accretion of the Office and not of the Concordance. The Binding Precedents school holds the opposite, citing the eighthieth sitting of the Concordance of Administrative Conclusions — which, in the course of reversing IAP-Δ-1, remarked in a schedule that "interval findings shall not be confined to apertures" — as authority that the broad reading was intended from the start.

The two positions cannot both be correct, and a motion to refer the question to the Court of Unseen Precedents was itself withdrawn in 1588 when it was observed that the reference would produce an interval between the schools and that the interval would then be the finding, which neither school wished. The question remains open and is now the oldest unclosed matter in the Gamma series.

Practical notes

Under IAP-Γ-451, no enumerator may count the same subject twice in a single day without a second enumerator present. The rule is enforced by the Obsidian Guard Caste on floors above 300 only, the Caste having declined the remainder as "not within the non-probing mandate." The Office of the Interval does not issue visitor passes; readers wishing to consult the Ledger should present themselves to the Bureau of Registry and expect to be counted twice before admission.