Manual of Spirelocation Survey, 4th Edition

Overview

The Manual of Spirelocation Survey, 4th Edition is the working handbook of the Survey Corps, issued from the Scriptorium of Vertical Instruments on 3-11-β-λ and superseding the 3rd Edition, which had been withdrawn following the Aperture Incident on Floor 2,208. It sets out the conduct of a Spirelocation survey in sufficient detail that a certified team may complete one without consulting any further document, a claim no edition of the Manual has yet satisfied and which the 4th Edition asserts in its preface nonetheless.

The Manual is bound in survey cloth and issued in a pocket format, though the pocket in question is the reinforced interior pocket of a Corps greatcoat and not any pocket in ordinary civilian dress. Clerks are reminded that the Manual may not be removed from the Tower. Copies carried below Floor 900 are to be weighted at the corner.

Structure and Contents

The 4th Edition runs to eleven chapters and four annexes. Chapters 1 through 3 restate the definitional matter already fixed by higher authority: what a Moss-Growth Spire is, what a survey of one consists of, and who may certify it. Chapters 4 through 8 are the operative core and cover instrumentation, party formation, the fixing of volumetric boundaries, the recording of deviation, and the closing of a survey. Chapters 9 through 11 are administrative. The annexes reproduce the standard field forms, the oath of the Boundary Clerks, a table of permitted tolerances, and a glossary of terms that the text proper does not use.

Chapter 6, on the ascents required to fix a spire's upper boundary, incorporates material from the Manual of Silent Procedure by reference rather than repetition. The incorporation is silent on the question of what to do should the two documents disagree, a matter taken up at length in the Survey Corps' own annotations, which are not part of the Manual and may not be bound with it.

The Tolerances Dispute

The 4th Edition's tolerance table at Annex 3 supplies the numbers by which a completed survey is judged acceptable or unacceptable. The table is drawn, on its face, from the Manual of Acceptable Strain, 11th Edition, and the drafting committee said as much in its covering note to the Librarians of the First Edition. This has caused difficulty, because the 11th Edition of that Manual is a known Volatile Edition, and its tolerances are reported from an edition not yet published. The 4th Edition therefore certifies surveys against numbers that have no settled authority, and does so without remark.

Two positions have formed. The first, advanced by the Survey Corps and restated in every reprinting since 3-11-β-λ, holds that the numbers are numbers and that a survey completed within them is a survey completed; the Corps has noted, reasonably, that no spire has yet moved because a table was uncertain. The second, associated with the reading room of the Stacks of Unfinished Sentences and set out at length by the annotator known only as Clerk Amaranth, holds that a tolerance without a settled parent document is not a tolerance but a wish, and that the 4th Edition should be suspended until the 11th Edition ceases to be volatile.

"Where the parent instrument has not yet been published, the child may be raised but not legitimated; and an illegitimated survey is an inventory without a floor."

— Manual of Perpetual Deferral, Revised Edition 44, Section 9, read in annotation by Clerk Amaranth

Clerk Amaranth's reading is disputed on the ground that Section 9 concerns the Hall of Perpetual Review and has no application outdoors. The Corps has not troubled to dispute the substance.

The Walnut Dowel Annex

Annex 2, a two-page insertion added late in the drafting and paginated separately, directs the survey party to corroborate the physical presence of a spire by tactile means before any measurement is entered on a field form. The instrument specified is the standardized walnut dowel of Edition 12 of the Manual of Corporeal Confirmation, and the 4th Edition reproduces its dimensions exactly. The insertion carries no author's seal. The Scriptorium has since ruled that an unsealed annex is advisory only, a ruling the Corps has not obeyed and has not publicly refused to obey, and the dowel remains in universal field use.

Incidents and Corrections

The Manual's reputation rests less on its text than on the surveys conducted under it. During the winter of Cycle 9,806 a Gamma-class team surveying an unnamed spire on Floor 1,412 recorded a boundary at a point they later could not reoccupy. The discrepancy was traced not to the spire but to the party's use of a 3rd Edition form, retained in the coat pocket of one clerk who had certified under the earlier Manual and considered the new forms officious. The clerk, one Boundary Clerk Havers, argued at the subsequent inquiry that the two forms differed only in the width of a ruled line. The inquiry found the difference to be 2 mm and found against him.

A further correction was issued in Cycle 9,809 and pasted into all extant copies, correcting the direction of a left-hand turn in the ascent instructions of Chapter 6. Copies bearing the correction are distinguished by a small pasted slip and, in the opinion of the Scriptorium, are the only copies fit to be carried above Floor 1,000. Copies without the slip remain in circulation and are not to be relied upon, though they are not to be destroyed, as the Manual of Taxonomic Purity requires that superseded texts be preserved in their uncorrected state.

The 4th Edition has never been formally replaced. A 5th Edition has been announced in each of the last four cycles. Precise coordinates for the announcement are filed at Floor 3,060.

Related Holdings

• Spirelocation survey — the practice the Manual governs
• Manual of Corporeal Confirmation, Edition 12 — source of the walnut dowel specification
• Manual of Acceptable Strain, 11th Edition — source of the tolerance table, itself unsettled
• Spirelocation Survey Team Gamma-12 — the team whose Cycle 9,804 observation is cited throughout the field examples
• Cartographer's Silence — observed by all parties during the closing of a survey