Physical Cartography

Definition and standing

Physical Cartography is the discipline concerned with the production of maps that are themselves load-bearing: sheets, plans, and sections that occupy floor area, obstruct passage, and can be stepped on. It is administered by the Department of Cartography and is held by that Department to be the senior of the two cartographies concerned with matter, the other being Paradoxical Cartography, whose practitioners dispute the characterisation in a filing that has been open since the Forty-First Concordance.

The practice dates its standing order to the survey of Floor 3,418, at which the drafting party found that the sheet, once completed, could no longer be rolled and had to be laid flat across the landing. Traffic for eleven days proceeded over it. The Librarians of the era recorded that "the map is walked upon and therefore is part of the stair," a phrasing that the Bureau of Concordant Cartography has since treated as the origin of Physical Cartography's claim to architectural jurisdiction.

Materials and measure

Standard sheets are cut from the grey card stock held in the reserve stacks, at a nominal size of 1,100 × 860 mm, though the discipline permits sheets of any dimension provided the resulting map can be lifted by two clerks. Heavier works — full landing plans, section drawings of the Recursive Staircase — are executed on boards of laminated board stock and are surveyed as fixed improvements rather than as documents.

Measurements are taken by chain, by rod, and, where the ground is disputed, by Somatic Cartography, whose practitioners argue that a route measured by a body in a given condition is measured more truly than one measured by a chain in a condition of its own. Physical Cartography accepts somatic readings for corridors under 40 metres and refuses them above that length; the refusal is not written in any Concordance and is enforced purely by the drafting clerks, who have never explained it.

Relation to the Department's other arms

The Department of Cartography asserts primacy in all matters of physical measurement and ingress, citing Fourth Concordance, Clause 302, and it is on this clause that Physical Cartography rests its authority to seal a landing pending survey. The Department simultaneously holds Empirical Cartography subordinate to Spiral Cartography in matters of ultimate adjudication, which places Physical Cartography in the awkward position of being senior in measurement and junior in appeal. Practitioners have learned to file their objections early.

Adjacent arms include the Department of Acoustic Cartography, which measures by echo and therefore measures walls rather than floors, and the Department of Noetic Cartography, which measures intention and therefore measures nothing at all as far as Physical Cartography is concerned. The Bureau of Contradictory Cartography maintains a standing file of every Physical Cartography sheet that has been found to describe a landing which does not exist; the file is kept in a room whose own plan is a Physical Cartography sheet, which the Bureau regards as either a courtesy or a joke, and has never specified which.

The sheet as structure

The discipline's central problem is that a sufficiently large physical map does not describe a floor, it becomes one. Floor 12,004 carries a complete plan of itself at 1:1, laid in 1890 and never lifted. Visitors report that the corridor follows the corridor and the drawn corridor follows the drawn corridor, and that the two agree only at the junctions. Maintenance notes for that landing record a standing instruction to walk on the printed lines, as the printed lines are better maintained.

Rolling such a sheet is treated as a structural alteration and requires a citation review. The last attempt, in the winter of the Long Count, required four clerks, a brazier, and an opinion from the Office of Ephemeral Cartography that the sheet had in any case already been rolled elsewhere; the opinion was filed, the sheet was not rolled, and Floor 12,004 remains as it was.

Disputes and Concordance conflict

The Fourth Concordance, Clause 302, grants Physical Cartography authority over "all matter measured in length, width, or depth." The Twenty-Second Concordance, Annex 7, grants the same authority over "all matter measured in length, width, or depth, except matter which is moving." The two clauses have never been reconciled. In practice the Department rules in favour of whichever is cited first in the hearing, and both sides have learned to cite first.

The more durable quarrel concerns Paradoxical Cartography Support, whose members hold that a physical sheet describing an impossible corridor is still a physical sheet and therefore falls under Physical Cartography's jurisdiction. Physical Cartography accepts the sheets and refuses the corridors. Several hundred such sheets are held in the reserve stacks, rolled, boxed, and noted as "awaiting ground."

Notable holdings

The discipline's reference collection includes the plan of Floor 3,418 (first survey, unamended), the 1:1 sheet of Floor 12,004, the chain survey of the landing outside the Bureau of Latent Cartography (contested, re-surveyed twice, both re-surveys agreeing with each other and disagreeing with the original), and a single card cut to no standard size, filed under an annex whose number does not appear in any Concordance in circulation.

A visiting rule attaches to the reference collection: sheets may be examined on the reading table but may not be folded, and any clerk wishing to carry a sheet out of the room must do so flat and must be accompanied by a second clerk walking behind them, facing backward.