Infinite Stairwell

The Infinite Stairwell is the designation, under Twelfth Concordance, Annex 2, for any vertical circulation shaft whose landings cannot be enumerated to a terminating count. The term is descriptive rather than locative: there are, at present, forty-one shafts so classified, of which only six are stairwells in the ordinary architectural sense. The remainder include two dumbwaiters, a laundry chute in the eastern wing of Floor 4-Rho, and a service corridor on Floor 88-C that descends one step every eleven years and has never been observed to stop.

Classification is administered by the Office of Vertical Topology, which maintains the Census of Unbounded Shafts. A landing is counted as enumerable if a surveyor can stand on it, name it, and return to it without the aid of a second surveyor. Landings that satisfy only the first two conditions are recorded as "provisional" and are not entered in the master ledger.

Etymology and early classification

The phrase appears first in the survey notes of Clerk-Adjutant Merrivale Ost, who in TR 1204 descended Stairwell 12-γ for nine days and recorded landing numbers on his cuffs as he went. His notes recover the term scala infinita from an earlier recension, now lost, and it is Ost's rendering — "the stairwell that does not arrive" — that passed into common use. Ost himself disliked the phrase and preferred "unbounded descent," a usage that survives only in the internal correspondence of the Office.

Early classifications were inconsistent. The Concordance of Measures counted a stairwell as infinite if it exceeded ninety-nine landings; the Ninth Concordance set no numerical threshold and relied instead on the sworn testimony of two surveyors that they had "despaired of the top." Both tests remain in force, which is why several shafts carry dual classification and appear twice in the Census.

The Petitions question

Considerable scholarly disagreement attaches to whether an Infinite Stairwell constitutes an Infinite Regress for the purposes of The Infinite Registry. The School of Infinite Recursion holds that it does not: a regress, on its reading, requires a rule of generation, and a stairwell generates nothing, merely continuing. The opposing view, advanced by the Readers of the Long Descent, observes that each landing is entailed by the one above it and that the distinction is therefore "a distinction without a riser" (Readers of the Long Descent, Memorial 9).

The question was referred to the Atrium of Infinite Regress in TR 1456, during the Petitions of Infinite Regress crisis, and was not resolved. The Atrium accepted three petitions concerning stairwells, heard none of them, and returned all three stamped "received, not descended." The Infinite Registry records the matter as open, and Clerks of the Third Order have declined to apply the Infinite Stamp to any stairwell entry since.

"The shaft is not a regress. It is a building. Buildings are not amended; they are climbed."

— Office of Vertical Topology, Circular 14

Notable shafts

Stairwell Ψ (Psi) is the most carefully surveyed and the least understood. Its landings are numbered, but not in order, and successive expeditions have returned with incompatible sequences. The Backwards Stairwell descends when climbed, a property first recorded by Ost's second assistant and disputed for two centuries until the Commission on Directional Integrity confirmed it in TR 1388 by the simple expedient of sending a party up and observing where they emerged. They emerged at the bottom, nine years older.

Six shafts have been formally closed to traffic by order of the Librarians. Five were closed for structural reasons. The sixth, Stairwell 41-Kappa, was closed after a surveyor reported that its landings were "occupied but not by anyone," a finding the Office has never been able to confirm or dismiss and has therefore left standing.

Survey practice

Surveyors of unbounded shafts work in pairs and carry chalk, a plumb line, and a numbered tally of brass tokens, one of which is left on each landing reached. Tokens are not recovered. The Bursary of Ascent has objected to this practice annually since TR 1402 on grounds of cost, and annually been overruled; the Office's standing reply is that a landing without a token is a landing without a witness.

Descents are conventionally limited to thirty days, not from any belief that thirty days suffices, but because the Third Concordance, Annex 4, fixes thirty days as the outer limit of any single act of measurement. Surveyors who exceed it must re-descend from the beginning, a rule that has produced at least one instance of a surveyor spending his entire career on the same flight of stairs. He was paid. The Bursary notes this as well.

In popular and administrative use

"Infinite Stairwell" is frequently used loosely in the Tower to mean any tedious repetition of ascent and descent, particularly in the conduct of committees. The Librarians have discouraged the usage without prohibiting it. A visiting rule, posted at the head of Stairwell 12-γ since TR 1211, asks that persons entering the shaft not count aloud; the rule gives no reason and has never been rescinded.

The Census of Unbounded Shafts is revised every eleven years. The most recent revision lists forty-one shafts, three of them pending reclassification and one — Psi — listed twice, with a note in the margin reading "see also, and see also again."