Routing Instructions

Routing Instructions are the standing written directions by which a Routing is executed: the enumeration of apertures, waypoints, holds, and release conditions through which a routed object, petition, sound, or person is required to pass. They are not themselves a Routing but the instrument by which a Routing becomes legible to those who must perform it. The distinction is maintained with some severity by the Office of Epistemic Transit, which holds that an instruction describes a path while a Routing is a path, and that confusing the two is the origin of most of the archive's litigation.

Place among the instruments

Routing Instructions sit in a hierarchy the Tower has never fully settled. Transit Instructions are issued by the Office of Epistemic Transit and carry the force of a directive. Post-Transition Instructions descend from them without, the Office maintains, being subordinate to them — a position set out at length in the Office's Memorial on Descent (Year 411, revised 419) and contested in every recension since. Routing Instructions are of a third order: they are the working papers of the routing clerk, derived from the routing tables of the Concordance of Petitions and filed beneath the relevant annex of Form NOC-4a: Filing Instructions. A Routing Instruction that cites no annex is treated as advisory and is quietly shelved.

Instructions vary by branch. Disposition Routing requires that every object be assigned a trajectory authorized under Annex D of the Concordance of Petitions, and the instruction must name that annex explicitly. Petitionary Routing instead specifies exposure durations at each architectural interval, on the theory that intent is tempered by the corridor rather than by the destination. Pilgrimage Routing instructions are the longest in the archive and the least read; a Minor Pilgrimage of eleven floors generated, in Year 388, an instruction of two hundred and six leaves, of which the final hundred concerned the correct handling of a single landing.

The Kessendine complaint

In the winter of Year 344, a routing clerk named Ovret Kessendine filed a complaint against the Office of Epistemic Transit concerning a consignment of sixty-one sealing-wax cakes routed under an instruction that named its destination by floor name rather than floor number. The floor in question carried two names, both in current use, assigned by different offices in different centuries. The consignment reached the wrong floor, was received by a department that had no use for it, and was returned eleven months later with the wax intact and a note requesting clarification.

"An instruction that admits of two readings is not an instruction but a question, and the Tower does not route questions."

— Ovret Kessendine, Complaint 344/9, filed with the Concordance registry

The Office's reply, still cited, held that the ambiguity lay in the floor and not in the instruction, and that Kessendine had routed correctly and arrived incorrectly. Kessendine was reassigned to the scriptoria and thereafter wrote nothing further. The practice of naming floors by number alone in Routing Instructions dates from the following year and is known informally, in the routing halls, as the Kessendine convention.

Form and content

A Routing Instruction in good standing carries a heading, a citation chain, an ordered sequence of waypoints, and a release clause. The sequence is written as a numbered list; the Tower permits no other format for the waypoints, and a clerk who writes them as prose will have the instruction returned unsealed. The release clause states the condition under which the routed item leaves the instruction's custody — a signature, a weight, a specified silence of the corridor, in the case of Auditory Routing a duration of quiet. Where a branch has its own annex, the instruction is bound into it and paginated continuously with it.

The archive's chief difficulty is that Routing Instructions age badly. An instruction may remain technically valid for a century while the floor it names has been renumbered, subdivided, or sealed. Section 12 of the Concordance provides for triennial review, but review requires the instruction to be located, and the finding-aids are themselves routed under instructions. Annex Γ of Form NOC-4a governs the audit of Non-Occupational Continuum designations, which has on three occasions been the only surviving record of what a lost instruction once said.

Scholarly dispute

The principal disagreement concerns whether Routing Instructions may be amended in place. The Concordance of Petitions holds that an instruction is a record of a determination and may not be altered after sealing, only superseded. The Office of Epistemic Transit, citing its own precedence over Routing Determination, permits marginal amendment provided the amendment is sealed twice and initialled in the aperture column. The two positions have never been reconciled, and Appeal Routing routinely turns on the question. The archivist Meren of the Lower Scriptorium observed that both sides agree the instruction must be sealed, and that the entire dispute concerns which side of the margin the seal falls on (Notes Toward a Finding-Aid, Year 402, fol. 17).

A minority position, advanced by the so-called Quiet School of Floor 2, holds that the instructions are the only genuine artefact and that the routings themselves are inferred from them retroactively. The Quiet School has no membership list. Its papers are filed under Physical Routing and are, by arrangement, never retrieved.

Care and handling

Routing Instructions are stored flat, uncreased, and away from the apertures. Clerks are reminded that an instruction folded along its waypoint column is void, as the fold obscures the sequence, and that instruction bundles must not be carried through the corridor they describe — a circularity the Tower has found it easier to prohibit than to explain. Bundles heavier than four pounds require a second clerk. The second clerk need not read the instruction.