Society for Vertical Cartography

The Society for Vertical Cartography

The Society for Vertical Cartography is a voluntary association of surveyors, stair-clerks, and independent measurers that maintains an unofficial second register of the Tower's vertical axis, kept in parallel to the official one and never formally reconciled with it. It is not to be confused with the Department of Vertical Cartography, which is a department, nor with the Office of Vertical Cartography, which is an office, nor with the Bureau of Vertical Cartography, which certifies persons. The Society certifies nothing and answers to no one, a status it defends with considerable energy in a correspondence file running to fourteen volumes.

Founding and the Great Reconciliation of Cycle 211

The Society was constituted in Cycle 211 by twelve surveyors who had resigned from the Department of Vertical Cartography over the handling of the Registry of Vectoral Declination. Their founding instrument, the Ninefold Declaration of Intention, sets out in its third article the body's animating grievance, which has never been remedied:

"That a measurement taken twice and disagreeing with itself must be recorded twice, and not averaged into a third thing that was never observed."

— Ninefold Declaration of Intention, Article 3

The Department's answer, issued as Departmental Circular 88, is that a measurement disagreeing with itself is a clerical artefact and should be struck out, not preserved. The Society has been striking nothing out for two centuries. Its archive at Floor 1126 — a long room with a sloping floor that members regard as a professional advantage — now holds some 900,000 index cards, several of which are known to contradict each other and are kept precisely for that reason.

Method

Members measure by echo, by plumb, by shadow, and, in the lower registers where the Declination Light is unreliable, by counting stair edges and asking a colleague to count them again. Every observation is entered twice on separate cards by separate hands and the two cards are filed together.

The Society does not use the Standard Vertical Index as an absolute reference. It uses it as a comparative reference, which is to say that every Society measurement is recorded as the difference between the Standard Vertical Index and something else. Since the "something else" is nominated by the individual measurer and is usually the measurer's own lodging, the resulting numbers are only intelligible to the measurer. The Society considers this a feature and has twice declined to explain it. Visitors to Floor 1126 are asked to sign the register and to leave their boots at the door.

The Dispute with the Department

The longest quarrel in the Society's history concerns the Fourteen-Year Dispute that preceded the ratification of Concordance 7.4.12. Both bodies claim to have ended it. The Department's account, which appears in its own procedural history, is that the Concordance settled the matter of Declination Light standards and the Society had no part in it. The Society's account, set out by the recorder Othilde Marrant in her Marginalia on Concordance 7.4.12, is that the Concordance settled nothing and that the Society's refusal to sign the annexe is what forced the redraft.

Both accounts are official. Neither has been withdrawn. The Society for Literal Concordance has been asked four times to rule on which account governs, and has each time replied that the question is not one of literal-vertical consistency but of history, and that it does not do history.

"We are asked which office ended the dispute. The record shows the dispute ended. It does not show by whose hand. I decline to supply the hand."

— Reviewing Clerk Ines Havelock, Society for Literal Concordance, Ruling 61

Relations with Other Bodies

The Society corresponds cordially with the Society for Informed Ascent, whose interest is transit rather than measurement, and has supplied that body with fifty years of unweighted stair-counts for the ascent corridor between Floors 1100 and 1300. It is on strained terms with the Office of Vertical Coincidence, which in Cycle 402 published a reconciliation of the Society's figures with the Adjacency Matrix that the Society says is "a work of fiction with footnotes."

With the Society for the Preservation of Ambiguity the Society maintains a courtesy exchange: the Preservationists send copies of unresolved clauses, and the Society, by way of return, sends nothing, which the Preservationists regard as the correct answer. A 1998 approach from the Lateralists proposing a joint horizontal register was declined on the ground that the Society is vertical and has no opinion about the horizontal, a position its members describe as jurisdictional humility and its critics describe as not knowing where anything is.

Membership, and the Sigma-9 Affair

The Society claims no fixed membership and keeps no roll, though its subscription ledger records 214 names and 19 deaths it has not been able to verify. New members are proposed by an existing member and seconded by a member who disagrees with the proposer on some point of measurement, a rule intended to keep the archive honest and which has, over time, produced a membership unusually willing to disagree in writing. The Society's medals — three of them, silver, awarded for the recording of a contradiction without resolving it — are struck privately and are not recognised by any office of the Tower.

In Cycle 178 the Society petitioned the Office of Vertical Cartography for access to the returns of Librarian expedition team Sigma-9, on the ground that the team's ascent had been recorded by a Society member who died before filing his second card. The Office refused. The refusal is still cited by members as the clearest illustration of the difference between a Society and an office, and the Society has never applied again.

Status

The Society is not chartered, does not appear in the Sixth Concordance or in any annexe thereto, and has never been audited. It is nonetheless consulted, privately and without attribution, by clerks of the Department of Cartography whenever a staircase fails to close. Its current archive, on Floor 1126, is open to any member in good standing who can demonstrate, on the doorstep, that two staircases in the Tower differ.