Interregnum of the Still Tongue

The Interregnum of the Still Tongue (Cycles 902–918) is the sixteen-cycle period formally reckoned from the deposition of Tylus to the promulgation of the first of the Adjustment Concordances. It is distinguished from the other interregna not by any interruption of cataloguing — which continued throughout, largely unsupervised — but by the suspension of spoken administrative direction. During the Interregnum no instruction issued by voice was held to bind the receiving party, a doctrine set out at the outset in Circular 902/4 and never formally repealed.

Deposition of Tylus

Tylus had served as Presiding Librarian for Cycles 861 to 902. The circumstances of his removal are recorded inconsistently. The Concordance of the Quiet Stair (Annex 2, cl. 9) describes a voluntary withdrawal "at the close of the ninth hour, without ceremony and without objection." The Librarians' Working Record, 902 states only that "the chamber was emptied at the ninth hour and the door was found locked from within." Neither account mentions a vote, and no instrument of removal has survived.

What is certain is the consequence. Tylus had governed almost entirely by spoken instruction, and by his own accounting some four thousand standing directions existed only in the memories of the clerks who had received them. The Office of Standing Directions attempted a reconstruction in the winter of 902. It recovered 1,140 items, of which 312 were attested by a single clerk, 88 by two clerks who disagreed with each other, and one — concerning the routing of damp returns from Floor 412 — by nine clerks, all of whom agreed, and all of whom proved to have been in the same room on the same evening in Cycle 874. The reconstruction was shelved incomplete and is cited only in disputes where nothing else survives.

The Doctrines of the Still Tongue

Into this vacuum stepped the Doctrine of the Still Tongue, first articulated by the Librarian Hessa of the Beta-Aperture in a memorandum of 17 Sivan, Cycle 902. Hessa argued that a spoken direction had never been authoritative in itself; it had been authoritative because it was Tylus's, and Tylus was no longer present. Until a Presiding Librarian could be confirmed, no spoken instruction could bind. The argument was adopted within eleven days, which those who knew Hessa's reputation for patience regarded as indecent haste.

The doctrine produced a class of rulings that the archive continues to find difficult to classify. The Office of Standing Directions determined in Cycle 905 that a direction spoken by a clerk to another clerk was void if the second clerk could not later reproduce it verbatim, on the reasoning that a recitation was not the original. Clerks began writing everything down. Concordance 905/11 then established that a written instruction counted as a spoken one if it had been dictated aloud before sealing — a provision that preserved the interregnum's character while permitting ordinary business, and that has been cited in support of both sides of every subsequent argument about the period.

The Question of Attestation

There is a substantial and unresolved disagreement as to when the Interregnum ended. The Adjustment Concordances date its close to Cycle 918, when the Second Reconciliation Concordance restored the Presiding Librarian's voice to binding force. Scribes of the Still Point maintain that a voice cannot be restored by document and that the Interregnum therefore ran until the first spoken direction was actually accepted — a date they place at 19 Akhat 919, and some of their more rigorous members decline to place at all.

The difficulty turns on attestation. Under Annex 4 of the Adjustment Concordances a spoken direction is valid only if heard by two clerks who can attest it independently. The Clerks of the Still Point have recorded that between Cycle 918 and Cycle 923, 46 spoken directions were attested by two clerks and a further 211 by two clerks who were married to one another, a category for which the Annex makes no provision. The Curators of the Still have declined four times to rule on the second category and have twice begun to.

Effects on the Floors

The practical consequences were most acute on Floors 400 to 460, where procedural authority had historically been conveyed by a daily spoken briefing in the Briefing Rooms, North Range. With no briefing forthcoming, the clerks of Floor 431 instituted a written roster in Cycle 903. The roster was found void under the doctrine in Cycle 906, restored under Concordance 905/11, voided again in 909 on the ground that it had been dictated aloud in a room containing a damp return, and restored once more in 911 by a clerk who had not read the intervening rulings. It has been maintained without interruption since, and no one now claims to know why.

Less fortunate were the Clerks of the Still Pool, whose coordination with the Guild of Still Air on dampness management in the annex had proceeded by spoken arrangement from Cycle 884. Deprived of that arrangement, the annex was listed as dry in the returns of Cycles 907 to 912 and as wet in the flood report of Cycle 910. Both documents remain in force.

"The interregnum did not silence the Tower. It silenced the Tower's convenience."

— Hessa of the Beta-Aperture, Memorandum to the Office of Standing Directions, Cycle 902

Records and Commemoration

No anniversary of the Interregnum is observed. The Concordance of the Quiet Stair forbids its commemoration on the ground that "the period was not an event but a failure to speak," and the Librarians have upheld this on each of the seven occasions it has been proposed. The earliest surviving use of the term still tongue in a formal instrument appears in Cycle 911, in a marginal note by a clerk who has not been identified, and which reads in full: "their tongues are still but the shelves keep moving." A photograph of this note was struck from the circulated edition of the Librarians' Working Record, 902 without stated reason. The folio itself remains available to readers who ask for it by number.