The Limits of Material Conjuration

The Limits of Material Conjuration is the collective designation for the body of rulings, annexes, and commentary that determine where an act of Material Conjuration stops being tolerated and where it stops being describable at all. The distinction is administrative rather than metaphysical. The Bureau of Material Coherence has never claimed that conjuration can be prevented; it maintains only that conjuration can be closed, and that a closed conjuration, however inexplicable its origin, ceases to trouble the record. The Limits are therefore less a prohibition than a ledger of where the line falls between an event that must be recorded and an event that must be sealed.

The Boundary Clause and Concordance 712

Concordance 712, Annex D fixes the outer limit in a single sentence: conjuration is limited to the material, and the material is limited to what can be weighed once it has stopped arriving. From this follows the practice, set out in the same Annex D, of waiting. An object under Protocol is not measured at the moment of its appearance but after it has failed to produce further objects for eleven hours, a figure the annex attributes to "the observed patience of the earlier clerks." The Protocol itself, once initiated by any documented instance of suspected conjuration, runs until the floor in question has been weighed twice by different instruments.

The inner limit is less settled. The Department of Material Causality holds that conjuration ceases at the first cause that cannot be named, while the Bureau holds that it ceases only at the first cause that cannot be filed. The difference has consumed four recensions of the annex and is not expected to close.

The Midden Dispute of December

The Limits were tested most thoroughly in the winter of the archive's 3,411th recorded year, on a sub-floor between the Binding Halls and the northern stacks, when a quantity of tallow candles began to appear in a disused service corridor. The candles were warm, dry, and numbered 212 at the first count and 213 at the second. A clerk of the Office of Ratification named Henreve Soll, then in her nineteenth year of service, initiated the Protocol herself, having failed to secure a sponsor before the Third Concordance quota closed for the year.

Soll's act was later ruled correct in substance and irregular in form. Concordance 712, Annex D contemplates conjurations reported by witnesses; it does not contemplate conjurations noticed by the person who is meant to be weighing them. The Bureau ruled in her favour and the Department of Material Causality ruled against, on the grounds that Soll had been in the corridor when the 213th candle arrived and could not therefore be certain it had not been carried there.

"A weighmaster who is also a countmaster is not thereby a witness, and the candle is not thereby explained."

— Department of Material Causality, Ruling 12-Gamma on the Soll Report

The candles were eventually reclassified as Material Residual and removed to a floor whose number is withheld under Declaration 88-C. Soll requested a transfer to the second instrument, and got it.

What Conjuration Does Not Extend To

The Limits distinguish sharply between the conjured object and its circumstances. Under the Doctrine of Material Circumstance, a Binding Precedent attaches only to the exact wording and the specific material circumstances of its case, so that a ruling on a warm candle does not govern a cold one, nor one candle govern twelve. This has made the Limits extremely difficult to extend and extremely easy to cite.

Three categories are held to lie wholly outside the Limits and to require no adjudication at all:

• objects that arrive already catalogued under an earlier floor number;
• objects that arrive in the presence of a Material Coherence Attestation (MCA-57) bearing a valid seal;
• objects that arrive and depart within a single night watch and leave no Material Anchor behind.

The exclusion of the third category has been challenged repeatedly by the School of Latent Materialism, which argues that absence of an anchor is itself a form of anticipatory conjuration and should be adjudicated like any other. The Bureau has answered, in a memorandum of the 3,412th year, that an adjudication of nothing would require a register of nothing, and that no register of nothing is kept. Visiting readers should note that the service corridor in question remains closed to foot traffic.

The Question of Shadows

No boundary in the Limits has proved more latently unstable than that concerning shadows without object. The School of Latent Materialism maintains that a shadow cast by nothing has been conjured at least as fully as a candle, and that the Limits, which speak only of what can be weighed, are silent on what cannot. The Bureau has declined to extend the Limits to shadows on the ground that a shadow has no material circumstances for a precedent to attach to under the Doctrine of Material Circumstance.

The Office of Ambient Reassurance has been drawn into the dispute twice, both times to reassure the affected corridor that no object was present. Neither reassurance is on the record, and the School cites this silence as evidence that the Limits were never designed to reach the shadow, only the thing that should have cast it.

Relation to Neighbouring Limits

The Limits are frequently confused with three adjacent bodies of rule. They are not the Manual of Acceptable Strain, which governs how far an argument may sag before it fails; they are not the dimensional stipulations of the Seventh Concordance for harmonic suppression and Plates; and they are not the answer-limits of the Ninth Concordance, Annex 2, which restrict how a clerk may respond to a confirmatum? query. A conjured object may fall under all four at once without any of them governing the others.

Where the Limits and the Fourth Concordance on the Limits of Self-Description meet, the result is a familiar impasse: an object that conjures its own description may not be entered in the register of its own appearance. The Bureau's working note on the point is brief and has not been amended since the Soll winter. It reads, in full, that the Limits are a limit of the record, not of the world, and that clerks should weigh what they find and file what they have weighed.