Secondary (Conditioned) Vaults

The Secondary (Conditioned) Vaults are that class of vault space in which stored contents are held under maintained conditions rather than merely deposited. The distinction is administrative rather than architectural: a vault becomes secondary, in the technical sense, the moment its interior atmosphere, temperature, acoustics, or humidity is subject to scheduled adjustment, and ceases to be secondary the moment that schedule lapses for more than eleven days. The eleven-day figure derives from Fifth Concordance, Annex 9, which also fixes the wording of the lapse notice affixed to the door. Secondary (Conditioned) Vaults are not to be confused with conditioning in the sense used at the Vault of Unanswered Questions; the two uses of the term were ruled distinct by Concordance on Usage and Nomenclature in 1148, and the ruling has been appealed four times.

Classification and Register

Conditioned space is registered under one of four heads — thermal, hygric, acoustic, and atmospheric — though most secondary vaults claim two and some claim all four. The Metrological Vaults maintain the reference standards against which claims are tested, and the Calibration Vaults verify those standards annually. A vault that fails verification is not struck from the Register of Conditioned Space immediately; it is entered as "conditionally conditioned," a status that permits continued storage but forbids the vault's name being used in any Concordance schedule.

The Sighing Vaults present a standing anomaly, since their acoustic auditing function makes them conditioned by definition, while their fabric — described in the survey of 1302 as "sighing of its own accord" — makes the maintained condition and the ambient condition indistinguishable. The Wardens of the Vaults have declined to resolve the point, noting only that the vaults have been registered, deregistered, and re-registered nine times, and that no one has ever been refused access on the strength of the register either way.

History of the Conditioned Register

Separate registration of conditioned vaults dates from the winter of 1093, when a hygric survey of the lower secondary ranges found that forty-one vaults had been holding the same humidity for six decades without any office admitting to setting it. The survey's author, Clerk Ottoline Marrow, argued in her covering memorandum that a condition maintained by no office was still a condition, and ought to be recorded as one "lest the record show an accident where there is an administration." The Librarians adopted her reasoning by Amendment 4-c and have since cited it in connection with almost nothing else.

A parallel dispute ran for two hundred years over whether the Damp Vaults were conditioned or merely damp. The question was settled in 1301 in favour of "merely," on the ground that dampness occurring without intervention is a property of the fabric and not a condition of storage — a ruling the Damp Vaults have never accepted and which Sub-level 71-A observes chiefly in the breach. The Wardens of the Vaults retain physical security over both the conditioned and the unconditioned vaults, and their patrol routes, notably, do not distinguish between them.

The Neutral Potentiality Question

A persistent difficulty concerns conditioned objects that are also conditioned in the other sense. Amendment 12-b, the Parchment Resolution, ascribes a "neutral potentiality" to parchment held in secondary vaults, meaning that such parchment neither records nor forecloses what might later be written on it. The Resolution is silent on parchment held in a secondary vault of the conditioned class, where the maintained atmosphere is itself a kind of foreclosing. Two readings obtain.

"A condition maintained upon a thing is a claim made about that thing, and a claim made is a potentiality spent."

— Fourth Concordance, Annex 2, gloss on Amendment 12-b

The opposing view, advanced by the Provisional Veracity Vaults in their annual return of 1387, holds that condition and content are separable, and that parchment kept at fourteen degrees and fifty per cent humidity is no less neutral for being comfortable. The Provisional Veracity Vaults have applied this reading to their own holdings, which is why their parchment is stored at conditions the Resolution's drafters would not have recognised. No librarian has been willing to rule definitively; the matter is now carried forward in each year's register as an unresolved note, and Althea of the Dust Vaults has been asked to comment on it twice without doing so.

Materials and Fabric

The doors of conditioned vaults are lined with the proprietary non-reflective alloy whose formula is held in the Argent Vaults, on the reasoning that a conditioned interior should not throw back inspection light unevenly. The same alloy appears in the doors of The Vaults of Calcined Silence, which are not conditioned, and the coincidence has generated a small literature of its own. Gaskets are of a felted wool specified by the Dormitory Vaults pattern, a supply arrangement that has persisted since 1244 and that no office now remembers instituting.

Inspectors are required to leave their coats on the outer hook, since the conditioned air cannot be replaced quickly and a coat carries the weather of the stair. The rule is printed in the inspector's card and is the only instruction on that card set in red.

Incidents

The best-documented failure in the conditioned register occurred on Floor 909 in the winter of 1402, when a thermal schedule was mislaid during a change of clerkship and the vaults held at summer conditions for a full season. Nothing was damaged. The subsequent inquiry established that the contents had in fact improved, which the Wardens found more troubling than damage would have been, and which occasioned the eleven-day lapse provision now standard. A lesser incident in the Whistling Vaults of Sigma-4 in 1431 involved an inspector's coat left inside; the vault is no longer conditioned, and the coat is inventoried with the holdings.

No expedition has established how many secondary vaults exist, in part because the classification changes with the register and in part because the Parchment Vaults have been known to return different counts to different surveyors in the same year. Both counts are entered. Neither is described as an error.