The Aethelred Protocol

The Aethelred Protocol is the collective designation for the standing body of procedural rulings governing the handling, measurement, and transport of Aethelred's Silence between the vaults of the Aethelred Spiral and the calibration chambers of Aethelred Spiral. It is not a single document. The Protocol comprises forty-one numbered Instruments, eleven annexes, and a supplementary schedule of corrections collated by the Office of Unrevised Instruments in Year 604, and it has been amended, suspended, and reinstated so often that the Eleventh Concordance treats its current form as "provisional, pending the settling of the Protocol itself" (Eleventh Concordance, Annex 2, clause 9). No complete autograph recension survives; the working text is reconstructed annually from the marginal notes of porters.

Origin and the Calibrator's Objection

The Protocol originates in the material audit conducted by Foreman Aethelred following the identification of the Silence's more inconvenient properties. Because the powder absorbs all description applied to it, every written instruction concerning its movement must itself be guarded against absorption, and the earliest handler's manuals are accordingly short, oblique, and largely unreadable. The first ten Instruments were drafted by Prefect Aethelred in Year 512 and promulgated the following spring, and it is from this promulgation that the Protocol takes its name, though no surviving Instrument uses the word "Protocol" of itself.

The adoption of the Aethelred Tome-Weight as the Protocol's reference mass was secured by Aethelred the Calibrator, who argued that a standard capable of absorbing description was the only standard proof against revisionist weighing. His opponents at the Bureau of Reference Masses objected that a weight which could not be described could not be verified; the objection was entered, noted, and overruled by Aethelred the Calibrator's own subsequent appointment to the Bureau's chair. The Aethelred Primary Standard Alpha, whose first recorded custodian was Archivist-Clerk Aethelred, remains the protocol's senior physical article.

The Three Custodies

The Protocol divides custody of the Silence among three offices, in a cycle of nine days. The Vault Custody holds the substance; the Office of Unrevised Instruments holds the instruments; the Bureau of Reference Masses holds the weight. No office may hold two of the three at once, a rule whose necessity became plain in Year 547, when all three were lodged overnight in the same antechamber and the resulting silence was discovered to have absorbed the door.

Transition between custodies is conducted by two porters working in opposite directions along the same stair, who must not speak. The Protocol specifies the exact interval between their footfalls — reckoned at forty-two beats of the Aethelred Pendulum — and the eleven annexes are chiefly concerned with the case in which one porter arrives and the other does not.

"Where a porter is delayed, the instrument is to be read aloud to the nearest wall until such time as the wall is sufficiently described to be left alone."

— Third Concordance, Annex 4

Compliance with this clause is generally understood to be nominal. The Office of Unreconciled Minutes has recorded only two successful readings since Year 560, both on the same floor, in the same winter, by porters who could not afterwards be found to confirm them.

Dispute: The Number of the Instruments

The Protocol's principal scholarly difficulty is arithmetic. The Fifth Concordance fixes the Instruments at forty-one. The Ninth Concordance fixes them at forty-three, including two "instruments of anticipation" drafted in Year 588 to govern situations the Protocol had not yet encountered. The Eleventh Concordance observes that the discrepancy is itself anticipated by Instrument 17, which provides for its own miscounting, and declines to resolve the matter.

The prevailing view, advanced by Senior Archivist Aethelred and supported by the Office of Unrevised Instruments, is that Instruments 42 and 43 exist but may not be cited, being instruments of anticipation and therefore, in the phrase of the Ninth Concordance, "not yet true." A dissenting school associated with Aethelred of the Unseen Corners holds that the instruments exist and are binding, and that the Protocol has accordingly been in breach of itself since Year 588. The dissent has never been brought to a vote, as the Protocol does not provide for voting, and the provision against it is Instrument 44, whose existence is disputed.

Later Amendments and the Leaning Stone

Instrument 31, promulgated Year 571, requires that all protocol work be conducted in a posture of rest against a fixed stone, so that a handler's body may serve as a second, removable record of the substance's weight. The requirement produced the Aethelred's Leaning Stone, worn hollow over four decades of Senior Archivist Aethelred's habitual observance, and gave rise to the Aethelred Impression as a recognised secondary standard. The Tome-Weight was subsequently recalibrated against the impression rather than against the powder, a reversal that Foreman Aethelred protested in a memorandum of Year 573 and that has never been formally answered.

The Protocol's transport schedule was suspended entirely by Year 596, following the disappearance of the Fading Crimson of Aethelred's Retirement from the third day of the cycle. The suspension has not been lifted; porters continue to work the schedule under the standing instruction that they are not to be told this. The Crystallized Silence recovered from the north landing that winter is now held as Instrument 38, which cannot be read without first being described, and vice versa.

Observance

The Protocol applies to all persons on Spires 898, 899, and the connecting landings, with two exceptions: visiting surveyors, who are exempt during their first descent only, and persons carrying the Aethelred Resonator, whose readings take precedence over the Protocol's intervals where the two disagree, which they do at every ninth cycle. Handlers are reminded that the Protocol is not to be discussed in the presence of the substance, on the ground that it listens, a caution recorded in Instrument 9 without further explanation. Copies of the working text are held at the Office of Unrevised Instruments and at the upper landing, where the copy is chained and the chain is described. The chain has been described. It is no longer there.