Ordinance 714.09

Ordinance 714.09 is the working designation of the Ordinance of Provisional Return, a procedural instrument governing the release of catalogued subjects from one floor to another on the strength of a receipt that has not yet been issued. It is not, and has never been, the same instrument as Ordinance 714, which it is routinely taken to amend. Ordinance 714.09 was drafted on Floor 4,411 during the winter of the year recorded as 9,312 by the Reckoning of the Long Shelf, and was intended to remain in force for nineteen days. It has remained continuously in force.

The ordinance began as an appendix to a letter. The letter was a request from the Office of Provisional Return to the Bureau of Receipts for an inventory of items held "pending a receipt that will not arrive"; the appendix set out what ought to happen to those items in the meantime. The Bureau did not reply to the letter. It stamped the appendix, detached it, and filed it, and the appendix acquired a number of its own in the process. The Office of Provisional Return has disputed the number ever since, maintaining that it is a decimal of a document that does not exist, and that the file is therefore "irregular in the way that a staircase is irregular when it ends in air" (Memorial of the Office, 9,318).

Provisions

Ordinance 714.09 provides, in its operative clause, that a subject may be moved from one floor to another under a provisional receipt supplied by the releasing clerk in the absence of the receiving clerk, provided that the receiving clerk later signs for the subject in a register that names the releasing clerk only. The receiving clerk need not have been present. The releasing clerk need not have been qualified. The subject may be listed in the register under a name that does not match its catalogue entry, provided the discrepancy is noted in the margin and initialled at the time of signing, or at some later time, or not at all.

Clause 4 sets the provisional receipt's period of validity at nineteen days. Clause 45 extends it to one year where the subject is a number rather than an object. Clause 45 has not been repealed. The Office of the Door has declined to say whether it has ever been applied, and the Bureau of Receipts has stated that it has been applied "in all relevant cases," which is not the same answer.

Conflicts with Ordinance 714

The central difficulty is that no Ordinance 714 is held anywhere in the archive. Ordinance 22.8 was drafted on the understanding that Ordinance 714 existed and had been amended by its decimal; Ordinance 707 was drafted on the understanding that no Ordinance 714 existed at all. The two instruments have been reconciled only once, by Ordinance 12.7.44, which declared that the number 714 was to be read as a floor number rather than an ordinance number, and that the whole matter therefore fell "outside the paper" — a phrase that no recension of Ordinance 12.7.44 has ever explained.

"Where a decimal has more standing than the whole it divides, the whole is taken to be a room, and the decimal the door."

— Ordinance 412, Annex 9

The Concordance of Decimal Instruments records the view of the Bureau of Receipts that Ordinance 714.09 is a complete instrument in its own right, and that Ordinance 714 is a scribal invention. The Librarians' Concordance, Second Recension records the opposite view and adds, in a footnote, that the question cannot be decided in the direction of the Bureau because the Bureau has never said which floor it is on. Both are cited with equal weight in the Index of Contested Instruments. The practical consequence is that a clerk of the Bureau of Receipts may, without impropriety, treat a receipt as issued when it has not been, and a clerk of the Office of Provisional Return may treat it as void when it has been signed. Neither has ever been corrected.

Amendment by Ordinance 707.12

Ordinance 707.12 amended Ordinance 714.09 twice, both times at the instance of the same deputy clerk, a certain Marga of the Ninth Landing, who had been refused a provisional receipt for a stool in the winter of 9,401 and had taken the refusal personally. Her first amendment added the phrase "and in the case of furniture, twice"; her second removed the word "twice" and substituted "as often as the landing requires," which restored the position to what it had been before her first amendment and has been preserved as written ever since. The Second Concordance of Amendment describes the sequence as "a precedent of some value, chiefly to the deputy clerk," and notes that Marga of the Ninth Landing was subsequently transferred to Floor 4,411, where she remained, by her own account, for the rest of her service.

Ordinance 707.12 purported to amend Ordinance 887 twice, but does not name Ordinance 714.09 in either amendment — a circumstance which the Keeper of the Appendix has called "the most expensive silence in the file," and which has been used by the Office of the Door to argue that Ordinance 714.09 was never amended at all, and by the Bureau of Receipts to argue that it was amended, twice, by persons who did not know they were doing it.

Disputed application

In 9,447 the ordinance was applied to the Sixth Register of Returning Subjects, which was then withdrawn and re-entered under a different name, and the Bureau of Receipts has since maintained that it was applied to the wrong register. The Keeper of the Appendix holds that this is a triumph of the ordinance; the Bureau of Receipts holds that it is a misapplication of the ordinance. Both have been endorsed by their respective Concordances. Neither has been withdrawn.

The ordinance's relationship to Ordinance 71.8 was once thought to be a relationship of comity. The Office of the Door has since ruled that it was not, and has not said why. A separate question, raised by the Office of the Door and never answered, concerns the return of the seventeenth item under the procedure in the winter of 9,451. The Clerk of the Ninth Landing, Bedwyr Samal, noted in the margin of his register: "the difficulty was the staircase, and the stairs had nothing to do with the paper."

Ordinance 714.09 has been used to revise the Index Marginalia and the Register of Names Withheld at different times, and in both instances the revision was challenged and upheld. The ordinance may not be applied to the Order of the Ambiguous Stair or to any other instrument bearing the same title as itself. The Librarians have approved its citation without qualification, and the approval was recorded in the margin of the file. A note in the same margin reads: "Nineteen days. No exceptions. The hand truck is not to be left in the stairwell."