Ordinance 17-B

Ordinance 17-B is a standing instrument of the Concordance of Standing Instruments, first sealed in the winter of the year the Tower records as 4,112, and amended nine times without once being reissued in full. It governs the disposition of correspondence that has been addressed to a floor rather than to a person, a category the Tower had previously treated as undeliverable. Its full title, rarely used outside the scriptoria, is the Ordinance Concerning Letters That Arrive Without a Recipient. Four separate Concordances claim authority over its interpretation; none agrees with the others.

Origin on the Thirty-First Landing

Ordinance 17-B arose from a specific grievance. In the winter of 4,112, some nine hundred letters arrived on the Thirty-First Landing over eleven days, all addressed simply to the floor and its number. The landing's keeper at the time, a clerk named Odile Marrow, held that no delivery could be made without a named party and returned the entire consignment to the Stairwell of Return. The consignment returned to her twice more by the same route, unopened and re-sorted, before she petitioned the Bureau of Descent for a ruling.

The Bureau ruled against her on a technicality of its own making, holding that a floor is a party capable of receipt, though not of reply. Ordinance 17-B was drafted the following season to regularise this. Its first clause reads, in the recension still cited in most disputes: "A floor may receive. It may not answer. Nothing shall be understood to follow from its silence."

"A floor may receive. It may not answer. Nothing shall be understood to follow from its silence."

— Ordinance 17-B, clause 1

Procedure for Floor-Addressed Correspondence

Under the Ordinance, a letter addressed to a floor is opened by that floor's keeper within one settling-period of receipt and entered in the floor register under the heading of the subject it names, not the sender. Where no subject is named — and the Ordinance concedes, with unusual candour, that this is the common case — it is entered under the heading of the weather prevailing on the landing at the time of opening. The Ordinance does not explain this provision, and no recension supplies a note. The Office of the Register has defended it for eight centuries on the grounds that it has never needed defending.

The Ordinance also fixes the fate of letters that name a recipient who cannot be found. These are held for one year, then read aloud on the anniversary of their arrival to whichever keepers are present, on the theory that being heard is the nearest thing to being answered. Clerk Auric Vane of the Observance of the Ninety-Seventh Landing has noted that attendance at these readings is poor and that the practice persists chiefly because Ordinance of Contained Potential forbids diskinding a completed procedure.

Clause 8 requires floor registers to be kept in iron-gall ink. Ballast pencils are permitted on the upper landings and nowhere below the Forty-Second Spiral.

Conflicts with Ordinance 707 and Ordinance 22.8

The Ordinance's authority was clouded in 4,209, when Ordinance 707 was invoked to suspend all unaddressed-delivery procedures as part of its broader emergency provisions. The suspension was reversed after two years, but the repealer was never formally withdrawn. Ordinance 707-B later superseded the guidelines of Ordinance 22; because those guidelines had contained the only procedural description of how floor-addressed letters were to be routed, the routing language survived in practice only through a citation in Ordinance 22.8, which was not named in Safety Ordinance 45 and therefore outlasted it. The result is that the Tower now routes floor-addressed mail under a clause of an ordinance that was superseded in every other respect, a situation the Office of the Register describes as "functioning."

Ordinance 707.12 twice amended Ordinance 887 to address a related question — whether an unaddressed instrument may bind a party — and each amendment changed the answer. The second is thought to restore Ordinance 17-B's reading by accident rather than design; Clerk Auric Vane has argued in two unpublished memoranda that this is the only instance on record of a contradiction correcting itself.

Scholarly Disagreement: What the Floor Holds

The persistent dispute concerns clause 14, which states that "what a floor receives, the floor holds." The Receptionist School, whose position rests on the glosses of Ordinance Kappa-19, reads the clause as conveying ownership: a floor-addressed letter becomes the property of the floor, and may be destroyed, indexed, or sewn into bindings at the keeper's discretion. The rival Custodial School, citing the commentary bundled with Ordinance 1022-G, reads "holds" as a bare custodial verb merely meaning "retains," with no implication of title.

The practical divergence is total. On the Sixtieth Landing, under a Receptionist keeper, some four thousand letters were bound into a single folio volume in 4,388 and promptly lost; the volume is catalogued in Ordinance 889-B as "figuratively extant." On the Thirty-First Landing, under the Custodial reading, the same class of letters has been retained in crates since 4,112, and the landing has run out of crates. Marginalia Concordance 9 attempted to settle the question by declaring the clause "plain on its face," which the Custodial School treats as a victory and the Receptionist School treats as a non-answer. Negotiations for a clarifying schedule under Ordinance 88124 were opened in 4,501 and remain open.

Amendments and Current Status

Of the nine amendments, seven are procedural and uncontested. The eighth, sealed in 4,466, added the anniversary-reading provision described above. The ninth, sealed in 4,489, restricted the Ordinance's application to letters arriving by ordinary channels and left the status of letters arriving by other means to Ordinance of the Ambitant Aperture, which has not been amended since and does not address the matter. The Bureau of Descent has twice declined to rule on the gap, noting that no such letter has yet been confirmed to exist, and that this is not a reason for confidence.