Metaphorical Cartographers

Definition and Jurisdiction

The term Metaphorical Cartographers is applied in the Tower's registers to two related but formally distinct bodies: the practising membership of the Metaphorical Cartographers' Guild, and the loose order of unaffiliated surveyors who undertake cartographic work on metaphor without guild warrant. Usage is governed by Concordance 44, which reserves the unqualified phrase for the guild and requires unaffiliated practitioners to be styled "cartographers of the metaphorical, unwarranted" in all correspondence and on all instrument casings. The distinction is observed closely in Scriptorium Twelve and almost nowhere else.

The cartographers' remit is the delineation of metaphor — its extents, gradations, and points of crossing. A cartographer does not decide what a metaphor means. That is the work of the Office of Metaphorical Literalism, which has contested the point since before the present stairwell was hung. A cartographer determines only where the metaphor stops.

Instrumentation

Working kit is standardised under the Protocol of Manifest Delineation and comprises four instruments, catalogued together as the surveyor's closed set:

• the gradated rule, marked in comparative degrees;
• the plumb-compass, for establishing which way a metaphor falls;
• the transit-plate, bearing the seventeen named apertures;
• and the boundary stencil, for reproducing the lettering of a Boundary Stela on stone too small to stake.

The rule is frequently the only item returned at the end of an expedition. Librarian Ospreth Venn, in the survey summary for the winter of 2187, records that of forty-one gradated rules issued in that season, none were recovered, "the surveyors having found them useful for other things."

The Dispute Over Routing

The central controversy of the discipline concerns whether a route drawn across a metaphor is a survey or a decision. The guild holds the former: its position, set out in the guild's response to the Recursive Amendments Office, is that routing is a cartographic function and that a route merely records a crossing that was already there to be recorded. The Metaphorical Cartographers' Guild contests the authority of the Recursive Amendments Office on precisely this ground, and has done so in eleven successive recensions of the same memorial without altering the wording.

The opposing view is maintained by the Skeptical Cartographers’ Guild, which argues that no crossing exists until drawn, and that the guild's surveys therefore manufacture the terrain they claim to describe. The exchange has hardened into routine. Each party cites the same clause of the Third Concordance — Annex 4, on the priority of inscription over intuition — and each reads it against the other. No resolution has been drafted, though under Concordance 12 either party might request one at any time.

"Let the line be drawn before the ground be asked; for ground unasked has never yet refused a line."

— Third Concordance, Annex 4

The Metaphorical Cartographers' Guild reads this as licence to survey first and consult afterwards. The Skeptical Cartographers read it as a warning, and have printed it on the inside cover of their field books without comment.

Relationship to Adjacent Bodies

Cartographers of metaphor are one of several parties sharing jurisdiction over Metaphorical Supports, and this overlap generates most of the paperwork the discipline produces. The Metaphorical Engineers hold that a support cannot be placed until surveyed; the cartographers hold that a survey cannot proceed without a support to stand on. The impasse is resolved case by case, usually by a Clerk of the Lower Landings signing both certificates out of order and dating them to the same morning.

Relations with the Metaphorical Cartographers' Guild proper are governed by Appendix Gamma-7, which requires that the physical clasping of any appendix be witnessed by a quorum of guild members before the survey it accompanies may be filed. In practice the quorum is three, and in practice it is convened by whoever is nearest the door. Aethelred of the Unseen Corners is recorded as having witnessed eleven clasps in a single afternoon during the Low Registers audit, later found to have been all the same clasp, witnessed repeatedly because no one had told him it was finished.

Work on materials outside the ordinary map falls to cartographers under the Indexing Protocols for Non-Manifest Holdings, with which the guild performs its cataloguing of Metaphorical Flora. Worn or non-conforming palettes are not the cartographers' concern and pass to the Archive of Insufficient Palettes in the ordinary way.

Procedure of the Cartae Metaphoricae

A survey is issued as a Carta Metaphorica, drafted on vellum of a single standard, bearing the eleven named apertures and the surveyor's mark in the lower right. The carta does not describe the metaphor; it delineates the boundary of what the metaphor may be said to touch, and it is on the width of this margin that reputations are made.

Alteration of a route across a non-viable conduit — one through which nothing passes and nothing is expected to — requires first a petition to the Metaphorical Cartographers' Guild, and the guild has never once refused one. Librarian Ospreth Venn notes that of the two hundred and six petitions received in the present century, two hundred and six were granted, "the refusals having been lost."

Scholarly Disagreement

The dating of the discipline's founding is disputed. The Metaphorical Cartographers' Guild maintains that the office of cartographer of metaphor was established by Appendix Gamma-7 in the year recorded there, and that all earlier surveys are retrospective attributions. The Independent Cartographers hold that surveys of metaphor were being drafted on floors whose present numbers are lower than any guild charter acknowledges, and that the guild absorbed a practice it did not invent. The dispute is not consequential to the work, but it is older than several of the floors on which the work is done.

On one point the parties agree, and it is recorded in every recension: that the Metaphorical Cartographers' Guild conducts its surveying, drafts its Cartae, and places its Boundary Stelae according to the Protocol of Manifest Delineation, and that no carta is valid unless sealed at the corner with the mark of the Office of Metaphorical Literalism, which office has described the requirement as "ours by right and by inconvenience."