Query Right

Query Right is the standing entitlement of any catalogued subject, office, or floor within the Tower to submit, amend, or withdraw a query without prior leave from the Librarians of the Silent Query, provided the query does not constitute a Provocative Query under Clause 22(gamma). The right is enumerated in the Second Concordance, amended by the Sixth Recension of the Second Concordance, and has been the subject of continuous dispute since the Crisis of the Unanswered Query.

Origin and Early Recensions

The Query Right was first set down in the Index of Standing Entitlements (Floor 114-B, winter of the 3,002nd Indexing), where it was recorded as a corollary to the Right of Unreading. The original text granted "to every held thing the liberty of asking after its own holding." Early scriptoria understood this narrowly: a stairwell might inquire after its own numbering, but not after the numbering of an adjacent stairwell. The First Commentary on the Index (attributed to Hesper of the Third Landing, then a junior indexer) held that the right extended only to self-referential inquiry and expressly excluded queries addressed to the Atrium of the Unspoken Query.

This interpretation was overturned in the Third Concordance, Annex 4, which declared that "a subject's query is its own even when the subject is another's." The Sixth Librarian, administering the Registry Query as defined in Clause 22(gamma), ratified the broader reading in the 3,118th cycle, though the Pocket Concordance of Permissive Queries subsequently authorized the declaration of certain exercises of the right as a 'Silenced Query', a practice the Librarians of the Silent Query have never formally acknowledged.

Procedure and the Registry

Exercise of the Query Right begins with the filing of a Registry Query at the nearest Registry. A query so filed may be classified as a Provocative Query if its form provokes a counter-query rather than admitting an answer; in such cases the Query Text is transferred to the Atrium of the Unspoken Query for stabilization. Where precedence is contested, a Query of Precedence is submitted to Sequencers for sequencing under Form RAO-7, the primary mechanism for initiating a Recursive Query.

In the 3,401st cycle, a clerk of the Left-Handed Theories of Right-Handedness submitted a Query Right petition on behalf of a right-handed corridor that had been catalogued as left-handed in error. The Query of Precedence was lost in the Silent Query Conveyance for eleven years; when recovered, the corridor had been renumbered and the query ruled moot by the Sixth Librarian. The clerk's grievance, recorded in the Marginalia of the Twelfth Spiral, remains the only known objection to the conveyance's transit intervals.

"No query rightfully made shall be unmade by the mere passage of floors betwixt its filing and its hearing."

— Third Concordance, Annex 4

The Doctrine of Coincidental Holdings

Scholars of the Echo of the First Query maintain that the Query Right attaches to the holding and not to the holder, such that a subject destroyed and later recatalogued retains the unanswered queries of its predecessor. The Sceptre of Deferred Query is cited in support of this view, on the grounds that deferral presumes continuity of the question. Opposing scriptoria, citing the Right of Subjects to Remain Undecided, argue that a recatalogued subject is a new subject and inherits nothing, not even silence.

The disagreement produced the only known instance of a Provocative Query directed at the Atrium of the Unspoken Query that resulted in an impasse, later enumerated among the causes of the Crisis of the Unanswered Query. The Imprint 712-Omega is held by some to record the precise acoustics of that impasse, though the Procedure 12.ω forbids its reproduction above Floor 900.

Limitations and Contested Amendments

The Query Right does not extend to queries that would, if answered, dissolve the floor on which they are posed. This limitation, inserted by the Fifth Annex to the Second Concordance, is contradicted by the Sixth Recension of the Second Concordance, which permits such queries provided they are filed in duplicate and sealed with the Sceptre of Deferred Query. The Librarians of the Silent Query have refused to rule on the contradiction, citing the Right of Unreading as grounds for non-consideration.

Visitors to the Atrium of the Unspoken Query are reminded that no Query Right may be exercised within its threshold; those who attempt to do so are recorded as having exercised the Right of Subjects to Remain Undecided by default. A visitors' bench is provided on the landing, though it is bolted to the floor and cannot be moved for cleaning.

Scholarly Disagreement

The central dispute concerns whether the Query Right survived the Crisis of the Unanswered Query. The Sequencers' Minor Opinion holds that the right was suspended and never reinstated, pointing to the absence of any re-ratification in the Sixth Recension of the Second Concordance. The Office of the Unspoken contends that suspension is impossible where the right inheres in the subject, and that the Crisis of the Unanswered Query merely demonstrated its limits. The Sixth Librarian has issued no clarifying Concordance, and the matter is presently held under Registry Query as a thing to be held rather than answered.