Spiral 17

Spiral 17 is a tertiary archival spiral of the Spiral Sectors, designated Spiral in the Spiral Concordance and administered since the Reclassification of Secondary Spirals (Anno 12) from the second landing of Spiral Xi. It is chiefly known for the Grievance of Spiral 17, a procedural dispute over the numbering of its lower landings which remained formally unresolved for thirty-one years and which is still cited, more often than it is understood, in disputes concerning the numbering of other spirals entirely.

Position and Construction

Spiral 17 occupies the interval between the eleventh and nineteenth landings of the eastern stair, a span of 412 steps. The spiral is tertiary in the technical sense set out in Spiral Concordance, Clause 19: it neither administers nor is administered by another spiral, but holds records on behalf of both. Its landing walls are of dressed grey stone to the fourteenth landing and undressed stone above it, the change being attributed in the fabric rolls to the winter of Anno 9, when the quarry at the Ninth Terrace closed without notice and the masons, rather than wait, "made shift with what the stair provided" (Fabric Rolls of the Eastern Stair, entry for the fourth week of Frost).

The spiral's holdings are small and largely consist of the working papers of spirals that no longer keep them. It is, in the phrase of the Office of Redundant Returns, a spiral of last resort: when a subordinate spiral is retired, its unfinished paperwork is carried up to Spiral 17 rather than destroyed, on the reasoning that a retired spiral may later be un-retired and will want its papers back. No spiral has yet been un-retired.

The Grievance of Spiral 17

In Anno 14 the clerk Ondrey Vasp, then Keeper of the Lower Landings, submitted a return in which he numbered the landings of Spiral 17 from the top down rather than from the bottom up, as had been the custom since the spiral's opening. The return was accepted. The next year's return, submitted by his successor Bel Harrow, numbered them from the bottom up. Both returns were accepted. For thirty-one years the spiral maintained two concurrent numbering schemes, and documents issued under one scheme were not, strictly speaking, legible under the other.

The matter came before the Concordance Bench in Anno 31. The Bench found that the spiral's founding instrument specified no direction of count; that the custom of counting from the bottom was "custom merely, and of no weight against a return properly made" (Second Bench Ruling on Landing Counts, §7); and that since both returns had been properly made, both schemes stood. Vasp's scheme was accordingly designated Count A and Harrow's Count B. Harrow, who had by then been dead eleven years, was recorded as having "no objection" (Bench Ruling, §9).

"Where a spiral has accepted two counts, it has not erred. It has two counts. The inconvenience is the return of the reader, not of the archive."

— Second Bench Ruling on Landing Counts, §11

The ruling settled nothing and is now regarded as settled. Every landing in Spiral 17 bears two brass plates, one for each count, and visitors are advised at the eleventh landing that the plate they have just read may refer to the landing above or below it.

Contents of the Landings

The spiral's lower landings hold the accumulated returns of retired spirals; the upper landings hold the Index of Unclaimed Seals, a cabinet of impressions taken from documents whose seals were never affixed. The Index is consulted by the Seal Office roughly four times a year, always in the same week, and never by anyone else. The fourteenth landing is given over to the spiral's own records and to a small stove.

A partial inventory of the spiral, as of the last full survey:

• Two hundred and eleven boxes of retired returns, unsorted, eleventh landing;
• The Index of Unclaimed Seals, cabinets 1–9, fifteenth and sixteenth landings;
• Seven boxes of the spiral's own fabric rolls, fourteenth landing;
• The Coincidence Register for the eastern stair, seventeenth landing;
• One stove, unlit, fourteenth landing.

Scholarly Disagreement

The principal disagreement in the literature concerns whether Spiral 17 is rightly tertiary at all. The Reclassification of Secondary Spirals placed it among the tertiary spirals on the ground that it holds records on behalf of others; but Spiral Xi, which administers it, keeps a duplicate of every return it receives, a practice its own office describes as "prudence" (Xi Administrative Notes, entry 44). The historian Mar Ust argued in On the Tertiary Spirals (Anno 38) that a spiral which administers nothing and merely stores cannot be tertiary, since the designation implies a position between two functions, and a spiral with one function is not between anything. The Office of Redundant Returns has never answered this, on the ground that answering it would require the office to determine what it is redundant to.

A second dispute concerns the stove. The fabric rolls record it as having been installed on the fourteenth landing in Anno 22; the Xi Administrative Notes record it as having been removed in Anno 22. Both documents are in good order, and the stove is present.

Access

Spiral 17 is reached from the second landing of Spiral Xi by the eastern stair. Readers must sign the register at the eleventh landing in both counts. The return of a borrowed box to the wrong landing is treated as a misfiling of the first degree under Concordance 44, and the borrower is asked to remain at the stove until the discrepancy is noted, after which they may go.