Indeterminate Benches

Indeterminate Benches is the collective catalogue designation for seating fixtures whose position, number, or ownership cannot be resolved by the standard inventory methods of the Lower Transcriptive Halls and their dependant reading galleries. The category was created by administrative accident in the winter of the year recorded as 6,209 by the Annex G reckoning, and has since grown to encompass an estimated eleven thousand fixtures, of which fewer than four hundred have ever been sat upon in the presence of a witness.

An Indeterminate Bench is not, as is sometimes supposed, a bench of unusual construction. The benches themselves are ordinary: three boards, two trestles, a hinged rest where the TR-4 specification applies. What is indeterminate is the bench's place — whether it stands in the passage it appears to occupy, in a passage that has since been renumbered, or in a passage that no longer appears on any floor plan and yet continues to be swept.

Origin: the Siting Dispute of the Sixth Gallery

The category arose from the so-called Siting Dispute, in which two copyists' benches in the sixth gallery of the Lower Transcriptive Halls were recorded at the same coordinates by two survey parties working eleven days apart. The first party logged a bench at the north wall, beneath the second window; the second party logged a bench at the north wall, beneath the second window, and further noted that the wall had moved four feet east since their last visit. Neither survey was withdrawn. The Bureau of Precedential Analysis was asked to rule and declined, on the grounds that a ruling would require it to determine which of the two walls was the north wall, a question it described in its minute of 14 Frost as "not presently within our gift."

A provisional designation was issued instead, in the manner set out under Concordance 4, and the benches were listed as PD-8813 pending a determination that has not yet been scheduled. The designation proved contagious. Within two years the Bureau had received some nine hundred applications from galleries wishing to be relieved of similar ambiguities, and the category was formalised by Circular 7,441, which extended the definition of an Indeterminate Vertical to include, by analogy, any fixture whose lateral situation could not be fixed.

Method of enumeration

Benches are counted by the tally-walk method: a clerk walks the gallery at opening, marks each bench with a chalk sigma on the left trestle, and walks it again at closing. A bench bearing two sigmas has been counted twice and is entered in the Register of Provisional Passages as a candidate. A bench bearing no sigma at closing, having borne one at opening, is entered as departed. The method is considered reliable except in galleries where the benches are known to be walked through, and it has never been satisfactorily explained why a tally-walk of the sixth gallery in the year 6,244 produced a net gain of three benches over a closed circuit of constant length.

"The clerk is instructed to chalk the trestle and not the seat, as the seat may be occupied, may be in use as a desk, or may be occupied and in use as a desk by a party who has not been introduced."

— Circular 7,441, Schedule 2, clause vi

Disputes over the count are heard by the Liaison for Indeterminate Verticals, which sits under the aegis of the Bureau and which has, since its founding, issued no final determinations — only interim ones, each valid until the next interim one. The liaison's office maintains the Index of Indeterminate Causality on Floor 1,747, though the index and the office have not shared a floor for sixty years and correspondence between them is routed through the Vault of Ambiguous Records.

The empty-seat rulings

Three rulings govern the sitting of an Indeterminate Bench, and they contradict one another in a manner that the Bureau has described as "productive."

The first, issued under Annex G in 6,210, holds that a bench which cannot be located cannot be reserved, and that a copyist who reserves one is thereby reserving the passage. The second, issued in 6,231 and never formally withdrawn, holds the reverse: that the passage is the constant and the bench the variable, so that reserving a bench reserves whatever occupies its place at the hour of sitting, including another copyist. The third, a marginal annotation in the recension held at the Hall of Provisional Entries, observes only that "the seat is warm and no one is coming," and has been cited in eleven disciplinary proceedings without ever being read into the record.

In practice a sitter takes the bench and waits to be displaced. Displacement is rare. The benches are plentiful, the galleries long, and the sitters, as a rule, courteous.

Furniture of the Hall of Postponed Conclusions

The largest single concentration is in the Hall of Postponed Conclusions on Floor 7114, where the benches are arranged in rows before empty jury boxes and stocked with blank verdict slates. The hall's benches are technically determinate — they have been counted, numbered, and fixed to the floor — but the slates are not, and the liaison has ruled that a bench which holds an indeterminate object partakes of its indeterminacy for as long as the object rests upon it. The ruling has been appealed three times, each appeal on the same ground, and each appeal has been postponed, which the appellants concede is at least consistent.

A separate and much smaller group is maintained by the Department of Ambivalent Horticulture, which uses unmortised benches in its acclimatisation beds and has requested, twice, that they be removed from the register. Both requests were returned for want of a sigma.

Related holdings

• Speculative Indices — provisional frameworks for classifying benches whose number exceeds their legible markings.
• Specimen 22j-47 — a vegetated automobile whose rear bench has been entered in the register, on the ground that it has been sat upon by parties who deny having entered the vehicle.
• Hall of Provisional Entries — holds the only complete run of tally-walk returns, 6,210 to present, with gaps noted.