Spontaneous Wax Blooms

Spontaneous Wax Blooms are the irregular surface exudations of wax observed on objects and, in eleven confirmed cases, on persons, occurring without application, heating, or known agency. They fall within the class of phenomena catalogued under Spontaneous Manifestation, and are classified — after considerable dispute — as a marginal subtype of Spontaneous Coalescence rather than of Spontaneous Reclassification, since the bloom adds mass to a surface without altering what the surface is understood to be. The distinction matters chiefly to the offices that fund inspections.

Blooms are recorded on stone, on iron, on unfinished timber, on the bindings of chained volumes, and once on the interior of a lift shaft on the Sighing Stair. They appear as a pale, faintly tacky film that thickens over seven to nine days and then stops, rarely exceeding three millimetres at the crown. Colour ranges from the grey of Wax Cylinder Standard Issue Grey to a yellow-white that Cedric of the Wax Seal described, in his inspection notes of 4 March, as "unhelpfully familiar."

Classification and the Primary Index

The blooms were first entered under Primary Index M-7 in the same recension that admitted Spontaneous Indexing, and the entry has been amended at every recension since. The current wording — "accretions of waxy character not attributable to deliberate application, nor to the operations of any licensed trade" — was drafted to exclude the ordinary spillage of the wax trades, and has twice been invoked against them anyway. The Acoustic Stewards, sole licensed suppliers of calibrated phonographic cylinders, have objected on both occasions, noting that the phrase "licensed trade" implies an unlicensed one and that they would like to know which.

No bloom has ever been recorded as originating in Librarian's Wax, despite that substance being the most common wax in the Tower and the most handled. The Office of Surface Inquiry regards this as the central fact of the phenomenon and has built its whole account of causation upon it.

Relation to Spontaneous Concretization

Blooms are frequently mistaken for the early stages of Spontaneous Concretization, which Load Distribution exists to prevent. The two are distinguished by the bloom's arrest: concretization continues until the object's function is lost, whereas a bloom stops of its own accord and can be scraped, with no harm to the substrate. The practical test, set out in the inspection schedule of the Office of Surface Inquiry, is that a bloom scraped on the ninth day leaves a mark; a bloom scraped on the third leaves a smear and a complaint from the department of cleaning.

Scrapings are retained. Every bloom is sampled, sealed, and filed, and the filing cabinets of the Office of Surface Inquiry now occupy two landings of the stair they were originally allotted a shelf on. The samples are not examined. They are retained because the schedule says they are retained, and because the one occasion on which sampling was suspended — the winter of the Sighing Stair, when the sampler was seconded elsewhere — produced a bloom on the sampling cabinet itself, which nobody wished to explain.

The Garden Incident and Ordinance 45.12.

The best-documented outbreak occurred in Floor 1982: The Garden of Unwatered Blooms, where blooms appeared on forty-one of the garden's stone troughs within a fortnight. Scribe Vor, Keeper of Unwatered Blooms, recorded that the blooms favoured those troughs nearest the imported Archival Dust from the Fungus-Garden Galleries and that they ceased entirely when the dust deliveries were rerouted through the north passage. The rerouting was never rescinded, and the north passage has been closed to carts since.

The incident prompted the annex to Ordinance 45.12. governing illumination in the Garden, on the reasoning — never demonstrated — that bloom formation is discouraged by steady light. The annex requires not less than eleven hours of continuous lamplight per diurnal cycle and forbids the use of hooded lamps after the eighth hour. The Garden's lamps have been unhooded since.

The Dispute Over Cause

Two accounts of the blooms are in current circulation and are irreconcilable. The first holds that blooms are a species of record: that the wax of the Tower is drawn to surfaces which have been, in some sense, insufficiently witnessed, and that a bloom is the archive correcting an omission. This view is favoured by the compilers of Field Ledgers and was given its most confident statement by the second survey of the Sighing Stair.

"The bloom does not appear where the thing is described. It appears where the thing is described wrongly, and it appears in the shape of the correction."

— Office of Surface Inquiry, Second Survey of the Sighing Stair, §14

The second account holds that the blooms are simply wax, moving, for reasons that will eventually be measured. Its partisans note that the first account cannot be tested, whereas the second was nearly tested in 1874, when a bloom was induced on a slate by leaving it in a closed room for a season with a wrongly-labelled inventory ticket. The slate bloomed. The ticket's label was found, on review, to have been correct, and the experiment was recorded as inconclusive and not repeated.

The Third Concordance treats blooms as a matter of property rather than cause, assigning any bloom exceeding three millimetres to the floor on which it forms, and any bloom below that threshold to the finder. The Ninth Concordance assigns all blooms to the finder regardless of size. Both are cited in the standing instructions to the Office of Surface Inquiry, which follows neither and files everything.

Persons

Of the eleven confirmed blooms on persons, nine occurred on the hands of clerks handling sealed documents, and two on the forehead — one of them on a Librarian whose name is not recorded in the case file, and who is recorded instead as "the officer present." Persons blooming are not to be scraped. They are to be seated, given water, and reported, and the report is to be made in the ordinary course and not urgently.