Special Mandate Arbiters

The Special Mandate Arbiters are a designated class of Librarians empowered to determine whether a Concordance applies to a given floor, and, where it does, which of several mutually exclusive readings of that Concordance is to be enforced. They are distinct from the Arbiters of Concordance, who resolve conflicts between instruments, in that the Special Mandate Arbiters resolve conflicts within a single instrument — or, more commonly, establish that the conflict is not a conflict at all but an intentional feature of the text, which they then describe in a finding. Their findings are indexed by floor and bound in soft covers; the soft covers are a standing grievance of the bindery.

The office was constituted under Custodial Mandate 117, clause 9, following the Affair of the Second Reading on Floor 212, in which two departmental readers applied the same ordinance to the same gallery in opposite senses within the same hour and both were found correct. The Mandate's preamble records the finding that "a document obeyed in two directions is not yet a document," a phrase attributed to the then-Senior Appointments Clerk and disputed ever since by the Ontologicalists, who maintain that the phrase was the finding and not the preamble.

Commission and standing

Commissions are issued by the Senior Appointments Clerk on the nomination of the Arbiters of Silent Consensus, who oversee the office's vestibule and to whom the Special Mandate Arbiters report the outcome of every mandate they decline. A declined mandate is not a failure; it is recorded in the Register of Inapplicable Instruments with the floor number and the date, and the entry is read aloud in the vestibule on the first working day of the following quarter. Attendance is required. The reading takes eleven minutes.

Candidates are examined in the reading of a Concordance backwards, in the reading of a Concordance with one clause removed, and in the determination of which clause was removed. The third examination is administered without the candidate's knowledge and is the only one that may be failed silently.

Procedure and its hazards

A Special Mandate Arbiter proceeds to the floor named in the request, reads the relevant Concordance in situ, and issues a finding within one rotation of the Nocturnal Aperture. The finding must specify the clause applied, the reading enforced, and the readings suppressed. Suppressed readings are preserved in an annex and may not be cited in argument, though they are frequently the best available argument.

The known hazards are three. The first is that a floor may have been renumbered during the reading; the Arbiters carry a Flag for this purpose and are instructed to plant it at the threshold rather than on the floor, since flags planted on floors have been returned from the Receding Galleries in altered condition. The second is the saturation of the instrument itself, which produces the phenomenon catalogued as a Silent Audit of the ninth order and requires the Arbiter to stand down for a period not exceeding one rotation. The third is the temptation to apply two clauses at once, which is permitted only under Ordinance 55-D and only where a panel of three Librarian-Arbiters has unanimously agreed that the second clause possesses discernible latent utility — an agreement that has been reached four times since the Mandate, and three of those on Floor Na, where the clerks of the Special Collections Directorate have perfected a manner of presenting the file that the panel has twice described as "helpful."

Dispute concerning Floor 48-A

The office's authority is contested only in respect of Floor 48-A. The Silent Consensus of Floor 48-A authorizes the Arbiters of Silent Consensus to act on that floor without reference to any other body, and two recensions of the document differ on whether the exclusion is total. The recension held by the Special Collections Directorate, which belongs to the traditionalist school in the Crisis of the Receding Galleries, carries the exclusion; the recension held by the Committee for Catalogical Coherence does not. The Special Mandate Arbiters have adopted the practice of sending a junior Arbiter to the foot of the stair and waiting there until the question resolves itself, which it has not done since the winter of the year the galleries were measured.

"Where an instrument excludes an office, the excluded office may still read the instrument. It may not be improved by the reading."

— Special Mandate Arbiters, Standing Instruction 3, quoted in the Report of the Commission on Lost Phenomena

Relations with the Sniffing Stations

Special Mandate Arbiters do not ordinarily attend the Sniffing Stations, but are required to countersign the sample registers kept there when a reading turns on the condition of a floor's air, which it does more often than the uninitiated expect. The countersignature is a diagonal stroke in green; the Special Collections Directorate, which jointly administers the Stations, prefers a vertical stroke in black, and the difference has been the subject of a correspondence running to sixty-one letters, the last of which was returned unopened and is preserved in the archive of the vestibule as an example of a document that has stopped being a document.

Arbiters are reminded that the registers may not be removed from the Stations, that the green ink is kept in the left drawer, and that no Arbiter is to be admitted to a Station between the hours of the second and third rotation, when the floor is being read to.