Jurisdictional Reach

Jurisdictional Reach is a measured quantity, expressed in the Tower's records as a distance in spans, storeys, or — where the measurement is contested — in time, denoting the furthest extent to which a body's authority may be said to bind, lapse, thin, or merely be noticed. It is not a place. The distinction is insisted upon by the Office of Concordant Reach on Floor 44, whose standing notice to enquirers reads, in full: "Reach is not a floor. It is what remains attached to a seal after the seal has gone home."

Every body in the Tower possesses a Jurisdictional Reach, including several that deny having one. A body that has never claimed a Reach is nevertheless treated as having one of zero spans, which is itself a claim, and appealable.

The Seal and the Rope

The governing principle is that of the Doctrine of Proximate Authority, by which a body may regulate anything within reach of its own seal. In practice the seal is pressed in wax and the Reach is measured by rope: two clerks pay out a hemp line from the seal's impression outward until the body objects, and the length paid out at the objection is entered in the register. Where a body objects in writing before the rope is paid out, the Reach is recorded as nil, and the objecting body is thereafter responsible for the affairs of nil.

The measurement is not stable. Reaches are known to swell in winter, when the rope contracts and a body's authority is found to extend across the corridor and halfway down the West Spiral Stairwell. The Expeditionary Cartographers' Guild has produced three editions of a chart of these seasonal swells, of which the third is held to be definitive and the first two to have been drawn from the wrong seal.

The Measurement of Reach Across the Tower

Reach has been measured, at various times, by the following, with results that do not agree:

• Rope, in spans, paid out from a seal's impression until objection (Office of Concordant Reach).
• Sound, by the distance at which a clerk's name can be heard and still answered (Office of the Standing Roll, method since withdrawn).
• Storeys, by the far edge of the last floor on which a body has been permitted to affix a small brass plate (the Bureau of Jurisdictional Clarity).

Because a body may hold a Reach in spans, a Reach in storeys, and a Reach in time, and because these are convertible only in the presence of a witness, the office maintains a single conversion clerk. The post has been vacant since 812, and all three figures are therefore kept in the register side by side.

The Windle Incident and the Mandate of Tacit Clarity

Reach became a matter of general controversy following the Windle Incident, in which a body with a claimed Reach of forty spans was found on the day of the incident to have been regulating affairs at a distance of some three hundred and ten. The Bureau of Jurisdictional Clarity filed a grievance in consequence, and the working party convened to answer it produced the Mandate of Tacit Clarity. The Mandate did not resolve the question of the Windle body's Reach, holding that the body's Reach was a matter of fact, and facts, being the sort of thing that happens, could not be governed by the Mandate. The Bureau, subject to the Mandate's reach from that quarter, has contested the point at every subsequent session.

The Mandate did establish the operating rule now in general use: where a body's Reach is unclear, its exercise is lawful as far as it is uncontested. The rule was applied without difficulty until it was noticed that a body may exercise authority for decades over persons who have not contested it because they do not know it has been exercised, and that the whole advantage of the rule lies in the silence of the governed. The Office of Concordant Reach has recorded the observation and taken no position.

Floors of Contrasted Reach

Certain places in the Tower have no fixed Reach, and the office keeps them as a separate schedule. Chief among them is the provisional platform on Floor 340 reached by Vertical Expedition Sigma-9 along the Vertical Tram Line Sigma, whose Reach is held to be coextensive with the platform and therefore to move with the platform. The Inward Steep is the reverse case: no expedition from it has reached the office of the axiomatic bell -774 from above, and the office has accordingly assigned that Reach no upper bound and a lower bound of the last stair.

The Great Northern Air Shafts present a third case, their Reach having been measured by the Guild in draughts and disputed by the office on the grounds that a draught is not a distance.

Scholarly Disagreement

The Third Concordance and the Eighth Concordance do not agree on the Reach of a Concordance itself. The Third, at Annex 8, holds that a Concordance reaches all who have read it, and that its Reach is therefore a matter of the reader's diligence. The Eighth holds at Annex 2 that a Concordance reaches the whole of the Tower and the floor below it, and that its clauses bind even those who have not been told, which is said to be why one keeps the site inventory on the reverse.

Bench Ruling 45 preferred the Eighth's operatives while narrowing its reach, so that a Concordance now binds bodies it has never reached but not the bodies that drafted it. The result is that the Concordance Prime issues amendments to the Documentary Dissonance Practice that reach practitioners eleven weeks after the disputes they concern have been settled informally, and the practitioners have taken to settling them twice.

Three further doctrines continue to attract attention without settling anything. Jurisdictional Fluidity holds that a Reach may be granted rather than measured, and that a body so fluid may hold a Reach larger than its own seal in a season, smaller out of it. Jurisdictional Anchoring holds that a Reach is fixed by where the seal was cut and cannot be moved without cutting a new one. Irreconcilable Jurisdictional Momentum holds that a Reach in motion tends to stay in motion and is not to be measured while in that state. The Reflections on Jurisdictional Echoes observes of all three that they have been reconciled with one another by every clerk who has ever used them, and by no two clerks the same way.

Visitors are reminded that the floor of the reading room is not a Reach. A body may stand in the office without being within its reach and should not be asked to leave.