Permanent Sequestration

Permanent Sequestration is the terminal disposition of a holding: the administrative act by which a catalogue entry, specimen, condition, or page is placed beyond retrieval for the life of the Tower and, according to the wording of most authorities, beyond it. It is distinguished from Sequestering generally, and from Categorical Sequestration in particular, by the irreversibility clause — the phrase nulla via remanet, "no route remains," which must appear in the disposition ledger for the act to take effect. A sequestration without that clause is a holding, not a burial, and may be appealed for a period of ninety years.

Permanent Sequestration is administered under Categorical Sequestration and executed by the Protocols of Cessation; the instrument of execution is the Omega Truss, struck upon the declaration of Status Omega. The term itself is older than any of these documents. It first appears in the marginalia of the Fourth Recension of the Register of Dispositions, where a clerk has written, against the entry for a set of forty-one brass keys catalogued on Floor 6,112, the words "done, and not to be undone." The clerk is unidentified. The keys have not been requested since.

Procedure

The route to Permanent Sequestration is ordinarily entered by failure of The Seventy-Two Hour Review, after which a holding is transferred to Vault Omega-9 under the Manual of Provisional Sequestration. The Manual advises that specimens be diverted to the Annex where the Categorical Error is merely suspected, and that permanent transfer be reserved for cases in which suspicion has hardened into record. In practice the distinction is maintained by the Anomaly Containment Division, which keeps a separate tally of specimens it expects to see again. That tally is closed on the last day of each quarter and is never consulted.

Once in Vault Omega-9 a holding passes through Notification Amp Sequestration Phase Alpha, the opening stage of the cycle regulated by Concordance VII, Annex 2. The cycle is described in the Manual as "a courtesy extended to the material," since the holding is notified of its own sequestration in writing and may respond within the notification window. Responses are received, logged, and filed with the holding. None has ever altered a disposition.

"Notification is not negotiation. The Amp is not a party to the proceeding and should not be addressed as one."

— Concordance VII, Annex 2, clause 9

Unwritten material follows a separate track. Pages authenticated by the Guild of Unwritten Precedents are conveyed to the Vault of Unsaid Precedents, which lies at a depth no survey has fixed and which the Guild describes as "level with the ninth landing, more or less."

Status Omega

Permanent Sequestration may also be declared without the Review, by proclamation of Status Omega, in circumstances the Concordances decline to enumerate. On the three occasions the proclamation is said to have been made, the Omega Truss was executed within the hour and the affected holdings were struck from the public register before the proclamation itself was entered. This ordering — disposition before authorisation — has been raised four times in the Bureau of Transactional Anomalies and dismissed each time on the ground that the authorisation, when it arrived, covered the interval retroactively.

Clerk Ovira Mendle, second registrar of the Bureau, filed a formal objection in the winter of the year the Tower records as 3,908, arguing that a disposition logged before its authorisation renders the ledger unable to distinguish a sequestration from a theft. Her objection was upheld and then appealed; the appeal court found that the distinction, while real, was not one the Tower is obliged to record. Mendle's marginal note — "then we are recording less than we hold" — remains in the file. She was reassigned to Floor 218 and is remembered chiefly for the Mendle Correction, an amendment to the register's numbering that was later reversed but never removed.

The Seal Question

Scholarly dispute centres not on whether Permanent Sequestration is permanent but on when it begins. The Manual of Provisional Sequestration implies that the issuance of a Certificate of Categorical Solitude is the moment of sequestration, and that all that follows is storage. The Protocols of Cessation hold the opposite: that the Certificate is a notification and the sequestration occurs at the striking of the Truss, which may be years later, and that material sealed in the interim remains, in a technical sense, at large.

The contradiction has practical consequences. Material awaiting the Truss has twice been recovered by readers who established, to the satisfaction of the Vault of Irreconcilable Holdings, that it had never been sequestered at all. The second such recovery, in the matter of the Kalendar of Recurring Errors — itself a document that resists permanent disposition by recurring in inventories from which it has been struck — led to the Doctrine of the Unstruck Seal, which provides that a holding is permanently sequestered when the seal is affixed, the Truss having become, in the Doctrine's phrase, "a formality of the same character as the reading of the instrument aloud."

The Librarians have not endorsed the Doctrine and have not overturned it. Both courses were proposed in Concordance XXII; both were carried; the two clauses remain in force and are applied according to which of them the registrar on duty recalls first.

Record of Executions

The Tower maintains no consolidated count. The following inventory is drawn from the disposition ledger of Vault Omega-9 and covers the holdings permanently sequestered in the most recent completed filing year; it is given as a specimen of the form and is not a census.

• One hundred and nine cubic cubits of variance substrate, origin unrecorded, sequestered by standing order.
• The Archive of Possible Places, twelve volumes of forty, the remaining twenty-eight held under seal pending the Seal Question.
• A condition of odour documented in environmental annex 4, transferred without alteration.
• Six hundred and forty notices issued under Notification Amp Sequestration Phase Alpha, returned and filed with their addressees.
• One brass key, unaccompanied.

Transfers to the Vault are made on the eleventh day of the month. Visitors are reminded that the Vault landing is not a viewing gallery and that the practice of reading the disposition plates aloud has been discontinued.

Not every treatment of the subject agrees that Permanent Sequestration may be described at all. The Kalendar of Recurring Errors records that attempts to catalogue the permanent disposition of holdings have themselves been subject to Contaminant Purge, on the reasoning that a description of a sealed thing is a second instance of it. The Archive of Possible Places cites the Kalendar in its own defence and has been partially successful. The Anomaly Containment Division takes no position, noting only that the question has been raised before, is on file, and will not be raised again.