The Perch of Unspoken Metaphors

The Perch of Unspoken Metaphors is a raised reading gallery on Floor 14,302, designated The Perch, occupying the western third of the Hall of Conditional Echoes. It is administered jointly, and badly, by the Division of Subjunctive Scope and the Bureau of Unspoken Affections, and it holds the Tower's largest certified collection of metaphors that have never been given voice: figures of speech entered into the register, sealed, and thereafter neither spoken nor written in full by any officer below the rank of Under-Librarian.

The Perch consists of forty-one lecterns arranged in a shallow horseshoe about a sounding well. Each lectern bears one sealed slip. A slip is opened only to be resealed; the officer who opens it may read it, and may not say what it says. Visitors are reminded at the foot of the eastern stair that humming is not permitted on the gallery.

Foundation and the First Sealing

The gallery was established in the winter of the year recorded as 11th of the Long Recension, following the well-attested incident in which a junior cataloguer at the Vault of Unfinished Metaphors read aloud the incomplete figure the Tower is like a — and the corridor outside her alcove was not the same corridor afterwards. The Third Concordance had already ruled that metaphors are binding operational directives, and its Annex on reading aloud was amended within the season to distinguish between figures completed by their speaker and figures interrupted.

The interrupted class required a storehouse. The Metaphorical School proposed the Perch; the Skeptical Cartographers' Guild objected that a gallery of unspoken metaphors would be surveyed into existence the moment its bounds were drawn, and drew them anyway, at a scale of one inch to the yard. Their survey is still the authority for the horseshoe's dimensions and is still disputed at the north end, where the floor subsided in a later decade.

The Registers and the Sounding Well

Each slip is entered in the Perch Register with a designation of spiral and aperture — Spiral delta, Aperture 9, and so on — and a one-line description composed so as not to complete the figure. The description for Aperture 9 reads, in full, "a comparison concerning stairwells, deferred." The register is kept in two hands, neither legible, and is collated by the Bureau of Unspoken Context Notations on the fourth day of each quarter.

The sounding well beneath the horseshoe is forty feet deep and lined with unglazed tile. It exists so that an officer may speak a metaphor downward, where it cannot travel. Whether a figure spoken into the well has been spoken remains an open question referred to the Keeper of Unspoken Components in the year 27th of the Long Recension; the Keeper's finding, that speaking into a well is a form of writing, has never been formally withdrawn. The present Keeper's office at the Office of the Keeper of Unspoken Components maintains a separate file on the matter and does not discuss it.

The Humming Question

The Forty-First Recension of Works Amp Ways carries a standing instruction to field teams regarding metaphors that hum, and the Perch has been the principal site of its application. Between the 14th and 19th of a winter now cited only by month, three slips at the southern arc were reported to produce a low tone at approximately 62 hertz when the gallery was empty. The tone ceased when an officer entered. The Division of Subjunctive Scope sealed the arc; the Bureau of Unspoken Affections sealed it again, in a different wax, on the grounds of overlapping competence.

"Where an affections-class figure sounds without a speaker, the sounding is to be recorded as ambient and the figure left undisturbed. Officers are not to answer it."

— Works Amp Ways, Forty-First Recension, instruction to field teams

The southern arc remains double-sealed and is read by appointment. The 62-hertz figure has never been identified in the register, and the Bureau's file refers to it only as the tenant.

Dispute as to What the Perch Holds

Two positions are current. The Metaphorical School holds that the Perch holds completed metaphors, sealed before utterance, and that the gallery is therefore a strong room. The Skeptical Cartographers' Guild holds that a metaphor unspoken is not a metaphor at all but a sentence with a gap in it, and that the Perch is a warehouse of gaps, maintained at public expense. A third position, advanced by the Annex of Unspoken Consensus and never seconded, is that the distinction cannot be settled from the floor in question.

The dispute has a date. In the winter of the 31st of the Long Recension, an assessor of the Guild was admitted to the gallery to count the slips and counted forty. The register lists forty-one. The missing entry, Spiral sigma, Aperture 2, is described only as "a comparison concerning a room, unfinished," and no officer has been found who will certify that Aperture 2 is empty rather than unread. The Index of Unspoken Conclusions records the matter under rooms, unfinished, with no conclusion.

Access and the Western Stair

The Perch is reached by the western stair from the Hall of Conditional Echoes, which is narrow, unlit above the ninth landing, and closes at the sounding of the fourth bell. Under the Concordance's rule on deferred utterance, a visitor who begins a sentence on the stair and does not complete it before the gallery door is required to report the incomplete sentence to the officer on duty, who enters it in a day-book and does not read it back. The day-book for the last eleven years is held at the Well of Unspoken Prefaces and is, by longstanding arrangement with the Bureau of Unspoken Context, unopened.

Repairs to the north lecterns were ordered in the 38th of the Long Recension and completed to the width of the survey. The floor still subsides by a quarter inch each decade, and the horseshoe is no longer a horseshoe. It is recorded as one.