Sub-Basement Omega

Sub-Basement Omega is the deepest administrative volume of the Sub-basement whose existence is uncontested, and the only one for which the Librarians maintain a standing register. It is not a floor. Floors have numbers; Sub-Basement Omega has a designation, an aperture sequence of eleven entries, and a staff complement of nine, of whom six are accounted for. Sub-basement records describe it as "held under seal, pending depth," a formula first used in the Ninth Concordance and never revised.

Sub-Basement Omega should not be confused with Sub-basement Gamma, which lies considerably above it and is administratively unconnected, nor with Sub-basement Theta, from which it is separated by the full thickness of the Pedantic Gradient. Whatever lies below Sub-Basement Omega has been catalogued as Sub-basement of Unanswerable Petitions by some offices and denied entirely by others; see below.

Descent and access

Access to Sub-Basement Omega is by the eleven-aperture descent from Sub-basement Gamma's southern stair, and the descent is the only part of the volume that is routinely visited. Each aperture is entered by a Sub-Basement Clerk under Sub-basement Doctrine, and each entry requires a separate witness. In practice clerks make the descent in pairs and reverse roles at every second aperture, a custom not written down until the Sub-basement Cataloguing Corps codified it in its Standing Instructions of 1147, and then only in a footnote.

Visitors are asked not to speak between the seventh and ninth apertures. The reason given in the Standing Instructions is acoustic.

The ninth aperture opens onto the Landing of Deferred Matters, where the six accounted-for members of staff are permanently stationed. The remaining three are listed on the complement as "attending," which is a status and not a place.

The Sealed Handlist

Sub-Basement Omega is principally known for the Sealed Handlist, an inventory of everything catalogued below Sub-Basement Gamma, maintained in a single copy and never unsealed in the presence of more than two Librarians at once. The Handlist is not a document in the ordinary sense; it is a run of entries continued without break since 1147 and corrected by overwriting rather than revision, so that earlier states remain legible under the present one. Its custodian for the last ninety years has been Clerk Thelon, who is also associated with the Sub-basement Scriptorium and who has requested relief from the Handlist on four occasions, each request refused for want of a procedure to transfer custody without unsealing.

The Handlist's first entry is recorded as a single word, since overwritten. The second entry is a date. The third entry is the word "again."

Jurisdictional dispute

Whether Sub-Basement Omega falls within the primary jurisdiction of the Sub-basement Cataloguing Corps or is reserved to the Sub Basement Jurists has been litigated since the dispute that also produced the latter body. The Cataloguing Corps holds that Omega is a subordinate volume of the Sub-basement and therefore within its grant; the Jurists hold that Omega was never numbered, and that no grant of numbered volumes can reach it. The Sub-basement of Retired Ambiguities, whose Curators once contested the same ground, have declined to take a position, noting only that they have filed the question and consider it retired.

"A volume without a number is a volume without a jurisdiction, and a jurisdiction without a volume is a form of words."

— Sub Basement Jurists, Memorial of 1188, clause 6

The Sub-Basement Shadow Court has, since 1192, issued annual orders directing that the question be remitted to the Eleventh Concordance, which does not exist. Each order is duly logged by a Sub-Basement Clerk and each year the log grows by one line. The Clerk of the Register has described this in correspondence as "the most reliable instrument in the Sub-basement."

Contradiction between the Concordances

Scholarship divides on what Sub-Basement Omega actually is. The Ninth Concordance, Annex 2, describes Omega as a depository "for material whose depth has not yet been established," implying a place of temporary holding. The Fourteenth Concordance, Annex 9, assigns Omega the function of retaining what it calls "final humours," which the Sub-basement Cataloguing Corps interprets as a permanent deposition, and which would make Omega a second site of the kind found at Sub-basement Gamma.

The two readings cannot both be correct, and both are cited in current practice. The Fifteenth Concordance attempted to reconcile them by declaring that a volume may be temporary in respect of its contents and permanent in respect of itself, a formula that the Sub Basement Jurists accepted and the Sub-Basement Shadow Court rejected in the same session. No further Concordance has addressed the point.

Inventory of the ninth aperture

The following is the complete register of objects logged at the Landing of Deferred Matters as of the most recent audit, which was not completed:

• One bench, bolted at four corners.
• Six chairs, arranged for nine.
• One lamp, seventeenth-sub-basement pattern, refitted 1198.
• One handlist, sealed.
• Eleven entry-slips, nine signed.
• A quantity of chalk, sufficient.

The chalk is used to mark the ninth aperture on the inside, so that clerks returning upward can identify it. It is not used on the outside. Clerks are reminded that the descent may be made only in daylight, and that daylight on the Landing is supplied by the lamp.