Query Anticipation (QA)

Query Anticipation (QA) is the administrative condition in which a query has been registered, sealed, and docketed but has not yet been submitted to any Registry. It is a state of standing readiness rather than of asking, and the Tower distinguishes it sharply from the act of enquiring: QA describes the query that could be put at any moment and, by rule, is not. The condition is maintained under Clause 303 of the Third Concordance, which treats anticipation as a form of custody and therefore assigns it a floor, an officer, and a fee.

QA should not be confused with the Precept of Non-Anticipation, which forbids the anticipating of answers. QA anticipates only the question. The distinction is held to be obvious by the Grammar of Anticipation, which devotes its first chapter to it, and is disputed by nearly everyone else.

Origin and the Docket of Held Questions

The practice originated on Floor 214, in the winter of the year the north stair-rail was replaced. A clerk of the Registry office, Terzhin Halm, was instructed to hold seventeen queries overnight pending a ruling from the Coil of Anticipation. Rather than keep them loose, Halm docketed each on a separate slip, sealed the slips in a tin, and wrote the tin's contents on the outside so that the contents need not be disturbed. The instruction was repeated the following winter, and the winter after that.

By the ninth winter the tin had become a room, and the room a registry of its own, staffed by four clerks and one porter. Halm's original notice —

"Contents do not require opening. The outsides are sufficient."

— T. Halm, Docketry Notice 3, Floor 214

— is still painted above the door and is cited in the standing orders as the founding statement of Query Anticipation. Halm was afterwards granted a pension and a grievance, in that order; the grievance concerned the noise of the porter's cart and was never resolved.

Procedure and the Anticipation Interval

A query enters QA when it is sealed and inscribed with its own summary, and it leaves QA when the seal is broken by an officer of the Atrium of the Unspoken Query or returned to the depositor unopened. The interval between these events is called the anticipation interval and is measured in half-days from the hour of sealing. Intervals exceeding ninety half-days require the depositor to appear in person and to state, aloud, that the query is still wanted.

Depositors are asked to wait in the corridor. The corridor has benches. It is not permitted to read on the benches, as reading is a form of enquiry and would compromise the anticipation of the docketed query beside you.

Relation to Other Instruments

QA is the ordinary precondition of a Provocative Query, which cannot be classified as provocative until it has been anticipated for at least one full interval. It is also the means by which the Sceptre of Deferred Query is kept charged: the Sceptre draws on docketed but unsubmitted queries, and its keepers are required to maintain a reserve of no fewer than forty in QA at all times. The reserve is inspected quarterly. On one inspection it was found to hold forty-one, the extra being a lunch order from Floor 217 that had been sealed in error. The error was ruled to be an anticipation, and the lunch order remains in the reserve.

The Grammar of Anticipation supplies naming conventions for paired docketed entries, and the Morphology of Recursion extends these to queries about queries, which are held in QA at one remove. The Echo of the First Query is maintained permanently in QA and has never been submitted; the Librarians of the Silent Query are its appointed custodians.

Dispute: The Twenty-Two Day Question

Scholars disagree on whether QA constitutes a form of asking. The Third Concordance, Annex 7, holds that docketing is "a silence with a number on it" and therefore outside the count of queries put. The Fourth Concordance, which is shorter and was sealed in a hurry, states at Clause 12 that "every docketed query is put upon the sealing" — a position that would empty the reserve and drain the Sceptre immediately.

The conflict was tested in what is now called the Twenty-Two Day Question, when a depositor argued that his docketed query had been answered by the passage of time alone and demanded the answer. The Crisis of the Unanswered Query is sometimes traced to this proceeding; the more careful accounts trace it to a Registry Query later directed at the Atrium, which produced an impasse and required the transfer of Query Text for stabilization. The Query of Precedence was invoked, then the Query Right, and finally the matter was settled by the simple expedient of not deciding it. Both Concordances remain in force.

Maintenance

The QA rooms are swept on the second day of each interval. Seals are checked for cracking, and the tin on Floor 214 — retained as a relic — is polished but not opened. Requests to open it are refused, on the ground that its contents are outside.