Index of Indeterminate Causality

The Index of Indeterminate Causality is the official designation of Floor 1,747, a procedural and ontological classification floor wedged between the unnumbered landings below Floor 888 and the quarantine gantries of Floor 9,002. It is not an index in the bibliographic sense, nor a register in the sense maintained by the Department of Material Causality; it is a working instrument, a body of precedent, and — depending on the recension one consults — a place where a certain class of causes is held pending a determination that has not yet been made and may not be makeable.

Function and scope

The Index receives cases in which a cause is established to exist but cannot be assigned to a consequence with the confidence the Tower requires for ordinary filing. Where the Principle of Insufficient Causality permits an object's retirement in the absence of a discernible cause, the Index does the opposite: it preserves the cause, detains it, and issues a provisional consequence so that the paperwork may proceed. Causes admitted to the Index are given a holding number, a shelf position in the Central Index Column, and a notation of the confidence band within which the assigned consequence has been placed.

Three classes of matter are routinely indexed. The first is cause observed downstream of its own effect, as monitored by the Ambient Causality Observatories of Spiral 88; these are cross-filed with the Reverse Causality Stacks and are not, strictly speaking, indeterminate so much as out of order. The second is cause supplied by petition, of which the Chamber of Conditional Causality is the chief but not the only source. The third is residual cause — the great mass of the Index's holdings — consisting of causes whose consequences have simply never been filed and which the Index keeps against the possibility that they might be.

History

The floor was designated by an instrument of Year 11,904 whose enacting clause survives only in summary. The summary records that the Index was established "to receive what the reckoning could not, and to receive it in order," a phrasing that has been litigated at least eleven times. The first three thousand entries were made in a single winter by a clerk named Merrow Quill, who is reported to have worked without heat because the radiators on that landing ran off a duct connected to Floor 888's boiler, which was itself under quarantine that season. Quill's entries remain legible and are still cited; her shelf notation, abandoned in Year 12,041, is the source of the modern holding numbers.

The Index's authority was considerably enlarged by the Contradiction Cascade of Epoch 71-, during which Engine #7 affirmed both a proposition and its negation for thirty-seven hours. The floor absorbed four hundred and six provisional causes generated during the cascade, none of which have since been withdrawn. A closing note in the intake ledger observes only that the floor was quiet afterwards and that the lift was out.

Procedure

A cause is admitted by a duty officer of the Index, who assigns it a holding number and a provisional consequence drawn from a list maintained under the Mandate of Tacit Clarity, Schedule 9. The provisional consequence need not resemble the eventual one and is understood by all parties to be a placeholder. Cases where the provisional consequence later proves to have been correct are noted in the margin as "fortuitous" and are reported each year to the Master Floor Index.

Contested admissions proceed to the Chamber of Recursive Causality, which has taken the position since Year 12,301 that a cause which cannot be assigned a consequence is itself a consequence of an unassigned cause, and that the Index is therefore obliged to index itself. The Index has declined to do so, on the ground that it is a floor and not a cause. The dispute is unresolved and occupies three shelves.

Scholarly disagreement

Two recensions of the Index's founding instrument are in circulation, and they disagree on the floor's relation to the Reverse Index. The shorter recension, held to be earlier, names the Reverse Index as a subordinate apparatus of Floor 1,747; the longer recension omits the passage entirely. The Department of Material Causality relies on the shorter recension when it mandates the use of the Reverse Index in cases of Reverse Temporal Causality originating below Floor 1,747, and the Ambient Causality Observatory has objected in writing that this reading inverts the intended hierarchy. A third party, a copyist whose colophon reads only "Aperture 12, corrected against the longer text," is cited by both sides.

"The Index holds the cause; the consequence holds the Index. The floor is the consequence of nothing in particular and should be treated as such."

— Chamber of Conditional Causality, petition of Year 12,458, Annex 2

The Chamber's petition was received and acknowledged. It was not indexed.

Visiting and access

Access is by the north stair from Floor 888, which is unlit and one-way in the upward direction; the descent is by the service lift, which stops at 1,747 only when called from below. Visitors are asked not to reshelve held causes, to leave the intake ledger open at the current folio, and to keep their voices to the level of ordinary reading. The floor's reading room has eleven desks, ten of which are the Indeterminate Benches and cannot be sat at without a determination.