Praise-Sap

Praise-Sap is a stable, shelf-ready substance produced by the conversion of positive staff evaluations under Internal Directive 89.2, and the only material in the Tower whose manufacture consumes, rather than conserves, the record it is made from. It is a pale amber solid at archive temperatures, softening to a working paste above the eleventh gallery, and it holds a shelf without sagging for a stated nine years — a figure the Scribes of the Internal Sea have twice petitioned to have reduced.

Praise-Sap is held under Materials Class 4 (Converted Commendation) and may not be stored on the same shelving as the evaluations from which it derives. The two are considered, in the language of the Frameworks, "argument and residue," and their proximity is treated as an argument still in progress.

Conversion and the problem of surplus

Under §3 of Internal Directive 89.2, a positive evaluation is rendered down in a sealed retort at the Office of Commendation Conversion on the ninth floor. The process yields roughly one dram of sap per commendation of the second grade, and somewhat less where the commendation is hedged — as most are. The residue is destroyed.

This is the difficulty that has attended Praise-Sap since its authorisation. A compliment, once converted, cannot be supplied again in evidence. HIC Directive 029 requires that any evaluation cited in a disciplinary matter remain "whole and producible," and a converted evaluation is neither. The result is a standing prohibition: no evaluation may be converted while a complaint is pending against the person it praises. The prohibition is widely evaded. The Office of Commendation Conversion has never once refused a batch on these grounds, and the register of refusals is blank from the Year of the Fourth Recension to the present.

"Where a commendation has been rendered to sap, the sap shall stand in its place before any hearing, and the hearing shall proceed as though the words had been spoken aloud."

— Third Concordance, Annex 4, §11

The Directive on Phantasmal Architecture reaches a contrary position, holding at clause 6.2 that "a distillation is not a testimony," and the two documents have been cited against each other in at least forty recorded disputes. The dispute is not settled. It is, by convention, cited in whichever direction suits the matter at hand, a practice the Librarians have declined to comment on in writing.

Use as a sealing agent

Praise-Sap's principal employment is the sealing of commendation plaques and, since the revision of the Provisional Directive, of certain certificates of good standing. It adheres poorly to metal, well to vellum, and not at all to Silentium Sealant, with which it is chemically incompatible. A plaque sealed with both will lift within a season. The fault is conventionally attributed to the Sealant.

Where a seal must survive the humidity of the lower stairwells, binders blend Praise-Sap with a proportion of Eriopteran Sap; the resulting compound is darker, slower to cure, and held to be "more sincere" by the plaque-keepers, though no assay supports the description. Attempts to extend the sap with Quiet-Willow resin have been abandoned. The blend cured adequately but yellowed, and the yellowing was read, by three separate floors, as an admission of insincerity.

The Listing of the Ninth Floor

In the winter of 1140 — by the internal reckoning, the third winter after the first revision of Internal Directive 89.2 — the undervault of the ninth floor was found to have retained a season's conversion without a corresponding fall in the volume of its source evaluations. The floor's holdings of commendations had, in fact, increased. Clerk Amaranth Vey was asked to examine the register and reported that the surplus sap had not been manufactured so much as deposited.

The event is recorded as the Listing of the Ninth Floor. No cause was established. The undervault was sealed under Coherence Directive 301.45-b, and the seal remains. Access is granted twice yearly, for inspection only. Nothing has been converted there since.

Prohibitions and handling

Praise-Sap is not edible. The prohibition is stated once, plainly, in §8 of Internal Directive 89.2 — "the substance shall not be taken into the mouth" — and it is repeated nowhere else in the Directive. Readers consulting the concordance of prohibitions frequently miss it.

Handling is otherwise unrestricted. Gloves are customary, not required. The sap leaves a persistent sweetness on the fingers that several clerks have described as difficult to work past.

Disputes of designation

The Librarians have twice declined to classify Praise-Sap as an archival material, on the ground that it is manufactured from the archive rather than applied to it. The Office of Commendation Conversion maintains the opposite, citing the nine-year shelf life as evidence of archival intent. Materials Directive Theta-4 lists Praise-Sap among its Class 4 holdings and adds, in a footnote, that the listing is provisional.

The footnote is nineteen years old. It has not been revisited, because revisiting it would require the Office and the Librarians to agree on what the sap is, and neither office has been willing to say first.

Inventory of the standard issue

The shelf-ready unit, as supplied by the Office of Commendation Conversion, consists of the following. It is the entirety of the issue; nothing else is included, and nothing else is required.

• One sealed tin, 40 drams, materials class 4, stamped with the conversion date and the initials of the converting clerk.
• One vellum slip bearing the clause of the Directive under which the batch was authorised.
• One warning, printed, unillustrated, folded twice.

The tin is not reusable. Tins returned to the Office are destroyed, and the destruction is recorded; returns average eleven a year, almost all from the same floor.