Labyrinth of Provisional Conclusions

The Labyrinth of Provisional Conclusions is a graded examination structure maintained by the Guild of Theoretical Mechanics on Sub-level 7 of its principal hall, and the compulsory practical component of the Tower Guide qualifying examination. It occupies an irregular footprint of some nine hundred square yards, contains forty-one numbered junctions, and is rebuilt to a revised plan roughly every eleven years, most recently under Plan Eleven-B. Candidates enter at the Vestibule of Insufficient Grounds and are expected to reach the Exit of Admissible Findings within one working day. Most do. Several have reached it twice without leaving.

Structure and Grading

The Labyrinth is composed of short corridors, blind alcoves, and reading desks at which candidates are presented with propositions. Each proposition is inscribed on a card and graded by the structure itself according to the Register of Provisional Classes, which sorts conclusions into seven classes ranging from Class i (provisional in name only) to Class vii (held pending the arrival of a premise). The candidate's task is to advance through the junctions by correctly declining to ratify anything until its class is established. Ratification is accomplished by stamp; the stamps are chained to the desks.

Grading is continuous. A candidate who stamps a Class vii proposition as settled hears a bell ring once and loses the morning. A candidate who stamps nothing at all completes the course quickly and is failed for insufficient engagement. The narrow passage between these outcomes is the substance of the examination and the reason the Guild schedules only four candidates per quarter.

History

The Labyrinth was laid out in the year recorded in the Guild's foundation rolls as Year of the Third Recension, replacing an earlier and simpler apparatus known as the Corridor of Deferred Answers. The change followed the Second Concordance, which required that all practical examinations in provisional reasoning be conducted "in a manner admitting of retreat" (Second Concordance, Article 9). The Corridor had no branches, and therefore no retreat; the Labyrinth was built to supply it. An early plan provided eleven branches. Plan Eleven-B provides thirty-three, of which twelve are decorated and the remainder are load-bearing.

In the winter of the Quiet Quarter the heating failed on Sub-level 7 and the examination was conducted in coats. The Guild subsequently ruled, in a memorandum of Librarian-Assignate Ovett Marrow, that candidates might keep their outer garments on the grounds that "a provisional conclusion is more easily declined when the body is warm." The ruling has never been rescinded and now forms part of the standing instructions at the Vestibule.

Relationship to the Archive of Provisional Conclusions

The Labyrinth is frequently confused with the Archive of Provisional Conclusions, and the confusion is not discouraged, as the two institutions share a founder in Archivist Halvern Quist and an interest in the same class of material. The distinction is one of purpose. The Archive catalogues and conditionally ratifies conclusions; the Labyrinth tests whether a candidate can refrain from ratifying them prematurely. Material passed at the Labyrinth's Exit is not thereby archived, though the Exit desk forwards unsuccessful propositions to Floor 88 by pneumatic tube under standing arrangement Concordance 61 and they are received there as intake of the ordinary kind.

The Bureau of Premature Conclusions, which operates from a primary annex on that floor, has repeatedly requested that the Labyrinth's Exit be relocated to prevent what it calls "the accidental consignment of unripe findings." The Guild has declined. Its position, recorded in Plan Eleven-B, Annex 3, is that the Exit is where unripe findings are supposed to go, and that the Bureau's annex is welcome to stop accepting the tube.

Scholarly Disagreement

The structure's legal status is unsettled. The Fifth Concordance classifies the Labyrinth as a "fixed work of the Guild," which would place its maintenance and repair within the Guild's ordinary budget. The Eighth Concordance, drafted eleven years later and apparently without reference to the Fifth, classifies all graded examination structures as "portable apparatus," which would transfer their upkeep to the Office of Peripatetic Instruction and its perambulating budget. Both documents remain in force. The consequence is that the Labyrinth is repaired twice a year by two offices, each of which denies responsibility for the other's invoices.

"The Labyrinth is fixed. It has been in the same place for two hundred years. That it may be carried is not contended by anyone who has tried."

— Fifth Concordance, Schedule of Fixed Works, item 14

A minority view, advanced in the Proceedings of the Sub-level Society by Surveyor Adela Pent, holds that the Labyrinth is neither fixed nor portable but "revisional," on the grounds that no two candidates have ever walked the same plan. Pent's survey of the 197 junctions recorded across four plans found only the Vestibule and the Exit in common. The Guild has neither accepted nor rejected the paper, which is itself considered a provisional conclusion of some merit.

Notable Incidents

In the Season of the Long Queue a candidate named Tamsin Roe completed the course in forty minutes without stamping a single card and was failed. She appealed on the grounds that the Labyrinth had, in her words, "already concluded everything." The appeal was heard by the Board of Recensions, which found for the Guild but appended a note recommending that the Exit be provided with a bell so that candidates might know when they had finished. The bell was installed. Candidates still do not know.

The Labyrinth's junctions are numbered but the numbers are not consecutive; the sequence runs 1 to 41 in an order that Surveyor Adela Pent attributes to a clerical transposition in Plan Nine and the Guild attributes to deliberate design. The matter is the subject of a standing dispute between the Surveyor's office and the Guild's, now in its thirty-first year, and is expected to outlast both.

Access

The Labyrinth admits candidates, invigilators, and maintenance staff of either repairing office. All others must apply at the Vestibule and be escorted. Coats may be worn. Stamps must not be removed from the desks, even briefly, and the tube at the Exit is not for the disposal of personal papers.