The Protocol of Unwritten Silence

The Protocol of Unwritten Silence is a procedural instrument of the Librarians, first sealed in the winter of the forty-first recension, governing silences that have never been committed to a document and therefore cannot be designated, amended, or lifted by ordinary means. It is distinguished from the Silence Protocol proper in that the latter administers silences attached to a writing — a page, a preface, a room with a recorded name — whereas the Protocol of Unwritten Silence applies to silence that has no instrument behind it. The distinction is technical, frequently disputed, and has cost the Tower three separate commissions of inquiry.

Origin and sealing

The Protocol emerged from the practical difficulty that the Secretariat for Unwritten Protocols had catalogued extensively but never been given authority to designate. Its clerks could record that a silence had been observed in a stairwell, a scriptorium, or a sealed correspondence file; they could not rule on whether the silence had standing. The Silence of '73 had shown the Crown officers what happened when an undesignated silence could not subsequently be determined to have reached its term, and the Silence Protocol itself later recorded that the resolution of that matter "left the Guild without a means to determine when a silence had reached its term" — a gap the Secretariat had been complaining of since before the fire in the Lower Reading Room.

Under the Protocol, a silence may be entered in the Register of Unwritten Silences on the sworn report of two clerks who have independently observed it. Each entry carries a spiral marking — Alpha through Delta, in ascending order of the auditors' confidence — and the entry is thereafter treated as standing until challenged under the Third Concordance. The Register is held on Floor 404, adjacent to but separately locked from the room in which the Provisional Protocol Summaries from Floor 404 are stored, and is not to be consulted by daylight.

Relation to the Silence Protocol

The Protocol of Unwritten Silence does not confer designation; it records that designation has been withheld. This inversion is the source of the Tower's longest-running administrative quarrel. The office of the Fourth Amanuensis holds that an unwritten silence is a species of Latent Silence and should be administered under the classes and sub-indices of the Silence Protocol, including the review of narrative fulfillment at each observance. The Secretariat for Unwritten Protocols maintains the opposite: that a silence which has never been written cannot be latent, since latency under the Silence Protocol presumes a designation awaiting fulfillment.

The dispute is recorded in two Concordance instruments that do not agree. Concordance 12, Annex 3, states that "silence unspoken in the instrument is silence held in trust by the instrument." The Unwritten Concordance, at its ninth heading, states flatly that "no silence shall be presumed from the absence of a writing, nor from the absence of an absence." Both remain in force. Clerks in the Corridor of Petitions have been known to knot the two together into a single citation, which is not permitted.

The Arsinoetan question

In the seventh amendment to the Silence Protocol, the Crown officers acknowledged the "Arsinoetan position" — the teaching of the clerk Arsinoe of the Fourth Gallery, who argued that certain silences are observed precisely because they were never meant to be written. Arsinoe's own grievance is a matter of record: in the autumn of the forty-third recension she entered an unwritten silence in the Register and was refused a receipt, on the ground that a receipt is a writing and would have disqualified the entry. She filed a complaint against the office that had accepted her entry. The complaint was returned unopened, which she took as confirmation of her position and the Registry took as an unanswered petition. The Clause of Unwritten Authority was drafted the following year to settle the matter and settled nothing, since it is itself an unwritten instrument whose recitation at the Reading Desk is forbidden.

"What is held in silence without the office of an instrument is held not by the Tower but by the floor, and the floor may be asked to produce it at any time."

— Arsinoe of the Fourth Gallery, quoted in the Seventh Amendment to the Silence Protocol

Inventory of standing entries

The Register of Unwritten Silences is reviewed at each observance, and the standing entries — those never challenged and never confirmed — currently number four:

• One silence at the north aperture of Floor 404, entered under Alpha, undisturbed since the forty-first recension.
• One silence in the correspondence file of the Crown officers, entered under Beta, withdrawn and re-entered without explanation.
• One silence attending the unreadable sections of the Silence Preamble-Δ corpus, entered under Gamma.
• One silence in the under-stair at the Ninth Landing, entered under Delta, which the auditors describe only as "continuing."

The fourth entry has no recorded observer beyond the two who made it, both of whom have since transferred to Floor 61, where they maintain that they never used the term "continuing" and do not know who wrote it.

Challenges and the residual question

Challenges to a standing entry are heard under the Fourth Recension of the Silence Protocol, which formally recognised the Silence of Name but says nothing useful about silences that were never named. A challenge may therefore proceed only by denying that the silence was ever observed, which requires two witnesses to deny it — a requirement that has been met exactly once, in the case of the Beta entry, where the deniers and the affirmants were found to be the same two clerks and the matter was referred to the Concordance of Contested Records and has not returned.

The unresolved question is what the Protocol does when an unwritten silence ends. The Secretariat has proposed an amendment that would permit an unwritten termination — that is, a ruling that the silence has ceased with no writing to that effect — but the amendment, being necessarily unwritten, has not been filed. It is said to be circulating. The corridor outside the Register room is swept on the fourth day of each month, and the sweepers are instructed to leave any loose papers where they lie.

Scholars of the Tower's instruments note that the Protocol of Unwritten Silence has never appeared in any index, which is consistent with its subject, and is also, as the Third Silence's own custodians have observed, convenient.