Silent Consensus

The Silent Consensus is the accumulated body of unspoken agreement by which the Tower's Librarians certify that a matter has been settled without anyone having said so. It is not a deliberative assembly, a vote, or a document. It is, in the definition given by Librarian Consensus, Annex 2, "the condition of a question having ceased to be asked," and it is the Tower's most widely invoked and least written authority.

Because the Silent Consensus produces no record of itself, its findings are established by inference: a cessation of correspondence, the return of an agenda-slate unmarked, the quiet removal of an item from a reading-room table. The Arbiters of Silent Consensus are charged with reading these absences, and their determinations are entered into the registers as though the consensus had spoken aloud, which it has not.

Procedure and the Consensus Second

Silence is measured. The Consensus Second — a unit defined as the interval required for a single Librarian to complete one full breath without altering a position already taken — is the base measure of all mandatory silent contemplation, and it scales upward through the orders of Silent Audit enumerated in the schedules of the Pre-Consensus Voting Protocol. A consensus of the third order requires only that no objection be raised during the circulation of the provisional opinion-slates; the eighth order, required of candidates for the Arbiters of Silent Consensus, requires a silence sustained long enough that the slate itself is understood to have withdrawn.

The practical difficulties are recorded without embarrassment. In CY 118 a deliberation in the Hall of Perfect Consensus was held to have failed at the eleventh Consensus Second when an Arbiter coughed, and the matter — a boundary dispute between two reading rooms on the same landing — remains unresolved. The Consensus Second (practice) entry preserves a marginal note by the clerk Ondrej Vasp, who observed the proceedings and wrote: "The cough was not treated as speech. It was treated as a return to the beginning." Vasp was reassigned to the Buttresses of Consensus in the following winter and did not annotate again.

Relation to the Floor 48-A bodies

The Silent Consensus should be distinguished from the Silent Consensus of Floor 48-A, which is a constituted body with a stated membership and standing contradictions, and from the Silent Consensus of Y156 SCE, an event in which the suspended population of Floor 312 independently arrived at the same incomplete entry. The general Silent Consensus underlies both without authorizing either. The distinction is often lost. During the Contradiction of the Glass Spheres it was argued at length that the body on Floor 48-A could not have reached silence because silence was already held in common, and the argument was sustained on the ground that the common holding could not be located and therefore could not be shown not to exist.

The Diagram of the Silent Consensus, held as object and as document in two recensions, depicts the condition as a lacuna — an empty node in an otherwise continuous pathway. The Leymann Schematic version renders the node as absence; the earlier copy renders it as a small unshaded circle with no label. Neither is considered more correct, though the question has been put to the Arbiters four times.

Dispute over the year of establishment

There is no agreement on when the Silent Consensus began. The Third Concordance, Annex 9, holds that it was established in the same instrument that authorized the Floor 48-A body, and therefore predates it by no interval at all. Librarian Consensus, by contrast, treats the Silent Consensus as arising only after the Codicil of Lumen fixed the number of Consensus Seconds required for valid silence, which would place its origin some eleven years later and, awkwardly, after several consensus determinations that the Annex 9 reading relies upon.

"Where a silence is found to have preceded the rule that makes it silent, the finding stands and the rule is amended backward."

— Librarian Consensus, recension of CY 112, marginal gloss

The Guild of Silent Nomenclators has declined to arbitrate on the ground that the question concerns a name for a thing that has no name, and that their involvement in the dispute over the Vessel of Unspoken Consensus already occupies their standing committee. A minor school, centred on the Murmuring Consensus reading room, maintains that the Silent Consensus is a later invention retrojected onto earlier silences that were merely quiet, and that the distinction between the two is one of intention rather than of sound.

Access and restrictions

The Silent Consensus cannot be consulted directly. Researchers seeking its determinations apply at the Annex of Unspoken Consensus and are issued the relevant register of absences, which is often blank. Requests are processed in order of the Consensus Second at which they were lodged, and no applicant may speak while the register is on the table; the rule is enforced by the reading-room attendants and, more reliably, by the other applicants. Petitions to the Non-Consensus Spire for a spoken ruling are accepted and, by long practice, left unanswered.