Ordinance of Stillness

The Ordinance of Stillness is the constitutive instrument by which the Divan of Quiet Consideration was brought into being. It survives as Concordance 712, Annex γ, and is therefore not an ordinance in the ordinary sense at all — it is an annex that acquired the standing of an ordinance through repeated citation, a promotion the Bureau of Recensions has never formally ratified and has never seen fit to reverse. It is cited in more than four hundred surviving instruments and read in full, by the Bureau's own count, eleven times since 712.

Its operative text runs to a single sentence, and the remainder of the annex is taken up with the conditions under which that sentence may be suspended. This proportion is considered exemplary by the School of Instrumental Restraint and symptomatic by everyone else.

Origin and adoption

The Ordinance was drafted in the winter of 712 by an assembly whose membership is recorded only as "those seated," and adopted without division on the third day of the Month of Unhurried Argument. It was intended, according to its preamble, to establish a body "capable of deliberating at the speed the matter deserves," a phrase that has since been litigated on nine separate occasions, most recently before the Chamber of Perfect Stillness in the matter of the Kell Atrium adjournment.

The Divan convened for the first time on the forty-first day after adoption, in a room borrowed from the Office of Weights and Intervals and vacated, at the Divan's request, of all clocks. That request became the Ordinance's first customary extension.

Text and annexes

The operative sentence reads:

"There shall be a Divan, and it shall not be hurried."

— Concordance 712, Annex γ, clause 1

Clause 2 provides that the Divan may sit only upon a floor whose number is odd, a provision that has required the relocation of the Divan eleven times and, on one occasion in 749, its temporary dissolution. Clause 3 reserves to the Clerk of Stillness the right to declare a recess without stating a duration. Clause 4 is blank in the authorized recension; the Second Recension of 714 supplies a sentence there regarding the Basalt of Stillness, which the Bureau of Recensions has ruled is supplied by the recension and not by the Ordinance, and which the Divan has observed anyway since 715.

Annex γ is bound between two leaves of Stilling Vellum and may not be photocopied, transcribed in parallel columns, or read aloud by more than one voice. The last prohibition was added after the Incident of the Two Readers on floor 3,041.

The disputed clause

Scholarly disagreement centres on clause 2 and its relation to Ordinance Kappa-19, which arbitrated between the Ordinance of Stillness and the Ordinance of Fluid Jurisdiction by introducing Temporal Jurisdiction as a third category. The question is whether a Divan sitting in Temporal Jurisdiction remains subject to the odd-floor rule or whether, as the Concordance of Standing Interpretations holds at item 88, it acquires a floor of its own that has no number at all.

The Librarians have declined to resolve the point. A marginal note in the Working Copy of Concordance 712 — annotated in a hand the Bureau has never identified and never quite disavowed — reads:

"The floor is wherever the Divan is. This is not a figure of speech. Ask the surveyors."

— marginal note, Working Copy of Concordance 712, folio 44 recto

The Survey of Interior Elevations, 751 did ask the surveyors, who returned an inventory of fourteen rooms and no conclusion, observing that the Divan's chamber had been measured twice on consecutive days and differed by a hand's breadth in height both times.

Procedure under the Ordinance

Nothing may be put to the Divan until the Solemnalia of Stillness has been performed, which the Ordinance does not itself mention but which has been read into it by long practice and by the Chamber of Perfect Stillness's own instrument. The Stillness Phase that follows the Solemnalia is, by the Ordinance's logic, the only portion of the calendar in which the Divan may lawfully decide anything, since a decision taken outside it is taken hurriedly by definition. The effect is that the Divan sits almost continuously and decides almost never.

Petitioners are received in order of the length of time they have waited, measured from the moment they first asked. No petition may be withdrawn once the waiting has begun. The Ordinance does not say what happens if a petitioner dies; practice holds that the place is kept.

Consequences and criticisms

The Ordinance's most-cited consequence is procedural rather than substantive. Because the Divan cannot be hurried, no appeal against it can be disposed of within the lifetime of the Ledger of Damped Echoes that records it, and the Ledger has been closed and reissued twice. The Annual Reckoning 755 notes that of 1,208 matters referred to the Divan under the Ordinance, 1,196 remain open, eleven were closed by the death of all parties, and one was decided. That one was decided in error and reopened.

Its defenders hold that this is the point. "A body that cannot be hurried cannot be hurried into folly," writes the Commentator on Annex γ, though the same commentary concedes four paragraphs later that a body which cannot be hurried cannot be hurried out of it either. The Office of Stillness takes no position and issues its annual Certificates of Stillness in green wax as though the question had settled itself.

Visitors to the Divan's chamber are asked to leave their watches with the attendant and to collect them on the way out. Watches not collected within a year become the property of the Divan.