Provisional Allotment

The Provisional Allotment is a permit instrument of the Tower, issued in three classes, which grants its holder sight of a provisional object but not contact with it. It is distinct from the Provisionary Allotment, a spatial license for the temporary occupation of floor area, and from the Provisional Ratification by which objects so sighted are later confirmed or struck. The distinction is stated plainly in the Third Concordance, Annex Q, and is ignored in ordinary speech on at least eleven floors.

Classes and Instrument

Allotments are struck in triplicate on rag paper bearing the watermark of the Subcommittee for Provisional Realities, which convenes in the western annex of the Provisionary Allotment. Class-A permits sight at arm's length; Class-B at a distance of not less than two paces; Class-C at whatever distance the issuing desk determines, which is recorded on the permit and is not appealable. A Class-C Provisional Allotment is required for access to Floor 89, per the standing schedule reproduced in every edition of the Census Field Manual: Provisional Addendum since the fourth recension.

Holders are reminded that sight is the whole of the grant. A permit-holder who reaches toward a provisional object does not thereby acquire contact; the object simply ceases to be visible until the hand is withdrawn and the permit re-stamped at the nearest Provisional Shelf-Mark.

The Corrected-Instrument Question

The Third Concordance does not settle whether a corrected instrument counts twice against an allotment. This is not an oversight. Annex Q was drafted in a single sitting and the question was raised twice, once by the Clerk of Instruments and once by a scribe whose name the recension omits, and on both occasions the sitting was adjourned for the noon bell.

Practice has filled the gap unevenly. The eastern desks treat a correction as a continuation of the original instrument and charge it once; the western desks, which answer to the same Subcommittee and share a corridor with it, charge it twice. A clerk of the second grade, Osric Venn, maintained for nineteen years that this asymmetry was the reason his Class-B permit lapsed in the winter of the long frost, and petitioned four times for a ruling. The fourth petition was granted a hearing, at which the presiding Librarian observed that the question had already been answered by the Second Concordance and declined to say in what respect. Venn's permit was not restored. His petition is retained in the western annex as a specimen of correct form.

"An instrument corrected is an instrument made again, and an instrument made again is a second instrument, save where the correction is of a clerical character, in which case it is the first instrument and has always been."

— Third Concordance, Annex Q, marginal note in the hand of the Subcommittee secretary

Relation to Provisional Tagging

No allotment is valid until its object has been tagged under the Provisional Protocols. The Provisional Sigil (Ψ) is applied to the tag, not to the object, and to the object only where the tag has failed. Holders frequently confuse the two marks and present the wrong one at audit; the desks have stopped correcting this and now simply re-tag. A tag applied to a holder rather than an object is void, though it is left in place, as removal has on three recorded occasions caused the object to be sighted by persons not named on any permit.

Where an object is held under Perpetual Provisional Status, the allotment is renewed automatically and the holder is not notified. Holders have been known to carry lapsed permits for years without discovering it, since a lapsed permit looks precisely like a current one until it is presented.

Disputes and Jurisdiction

Because the permit is a document and the annex is a place, disputes over allotments arise in two jurisdictions at once. Clause 5 assigns contested allotments to the floor on which the object was first sighted, but the Provisional Aperture through which most first sightings are made is not itself a floor, and the clause is silent on apertures. The Librarian Provisional Arris has held, in an unpublished note of 14 Morrow, that an aperture is a floor for this purpose and not a floor for any other, a position the Subcommittee has neither adopted nor contradicted.

Fuel for the lamps required to exercise sight at Class-B distance is drawn against the holder's recorded allotment by Fuel Chits, and an allotment exhausted on lamps cannot be spent on the permit renewal in the same quarter. Holders are advised to renew first. The advice appears on the reverse of every permit and is printed in a size that the Subcommittee has twice resolved to enlarge.

Inventory of Classes

The three classes, with the standing limitations recorded against each at the last audit:

• Class-A — sight at arm's length; not issuable on Floors 89 through 96.
• Class-B — sight at two paces or more; requires a lamp and a Fuel Chit in good standing.
• Class-C — sight at a distance set by the issuing desk; non-appealable; required for Floor 89.

Permits are not transferable, save by grant, and a permit found on a person not named on it is confiscated without hearing. The Provisional Research Permit 4409 remains the only instrument of its kind issued to a party rather than a person, and the Subcommittee has declined four times to say how it was done.