The Rite of Silent Assessment

The Rite of Silent Assessment is the formal procedure by which a holding's ontological viability is determined through sustained, recorded silence. It is distinguished in standing practice from Fade Assessment, which measures attrition of detail, and from routine audits, which measure nothing and are not permitted to conclude. The Rite is administered jointly by the Office of Volitional Assessment, which supplies assessors, and the Bureau of Perpetual Revision, which supplies the forms and, more often than not, the objections. Authority for the procedure rests in Local Ordinance 117.C, sub-clauses 8 through 14, though the version most assessors actually carry is the short recension printed in the Manual of Luminal Gradients.

The Rite occupies between four and eleven hours depending on the holding. The subject is placed in a Silent Divan, a fitted isolation chamber of unplaned cedar, and the assessor remains outside, seated, recording intervals on a strip of prepared paper. No sound is made by either party. Silence is scored against the Seven Silences, a framework of graded abstentions whose seventh grade has never been satisfactorily described in writing and is taught in person at the Veiled Stacks. A holding that fails at the fifth grade is normally scheduled for further assessment rather than removed.

Procedure and the matter of the unlit room

A ritual precedes every assessment of a person, as distinct from an object, requiring the assessor to remain in an unlit room for a stated duration before the Divan is opened. The duration is set locally. On Floor 2149 (Marchward the figure is ninety minutes, while on the floor above it is two hours and twelve minutes, a discrepancy traced to an error in transcription made in the winter of the year the Marchward annexes were recopied. The error has been retained because the assessors have grown used to it.

The Rite is also employed, in a reduced form, within the Hypothetical Durability Assessment, where it serves to measure the substrate's tolerance for sustained ontological ambiguity. It is on this reduced form that the Silent Choirs are convened for the assessment and containment of Category II or III anomalies. Choir members do not speak during the Rite and are not required to have spoken beforehand; several have not spoken in years, which is considered an advantage rather than a condition of service.

Origin and the Revision of 4 Colophon

The Rite is generally dated to the Concordance of the Ninth Silence, though the Ninth Silence is itself a disputed designation and may refer to a document, a floor, or a period of eleven days in which no Concordance was amended. The received account, given by Librarian Ossian Vey in the colophon to the fourth recension, holds that the Rite was devised to settle a dispute between two cataloguers who could not agree whether a particular holding had ever existed and who were, by the terms of their dispute, forbidden to speak to one another until it was resolved. They remained silent for six days. The holding was entered. Neither spoke again on the subject.

Vey's account is disputed. The Office of Volumetric Assessment maintains that the Rite originated as a weighing procedure and that the silence was incidental, a point argued at length in its memorandum of 4 Colophon and never withdrawn. The memorandum is 212 pages long and is filed under weights.

Reporting and the seal

Assessors report on Form 11-S, which records the seven grades in order, the duration of each, and a final determination of Viable, Deferred, or Not Proceeding. The distinction between Deferred and Not Proceeding has been the subject of four amendments and remains unclear. Sub-Registrar Halden Croy, who held the Divan office for nineteen years, submitted in his retirement note that he had "never once been able to tell which of the two I was writing, and had formed the habit of writing whichever came first to the nib." The note is preserved in the Annex of Unresolved Determinations and is cited whenever the question is raised.

Determinations must be sealed with the assessor's own seal and not a borrowed one. A holding assessed under a borrowed seal is void and must be re-assessed, a rule introduced after the Affair of the Two Seals on Floor 3311, in which a single seal was used for forty-one consecutive assessments and the resulting determinations were found to be indistinguishable from one another. Only eleven were re-assessed. The remaining thirty were entered as though valid, and are still consulted.

"Silence is not the absence of a finding. It is a finding entered at greater length."

— Local Ordinance 117.C, sub-clause 11

Controversy: the seventh grade

The central scholarly difficulty concerns the seventh grade of the Seven Silences, which no assessor has been willing to describe in writing and which is therefore defined only by reference to itself. The Bureau of Perpetual Revision holds that the seventh grade cannot be reached, and that its inclusion in the framework is a residue of an earlier and longer framework whose eighth and ninth grades were struck in the Rite of Seasonal Revision. The Office of Volitional Assessment holds that the seventh grade is reached routinely and that assessors who claim otherwise have simply not been paying attention.

Both positions cite Local Ordinance 117.C, and both are correct to do so, since sub-clause 14 supports each of them in a single sentence of unusual construction. No amendment has been proposed, for the reason given by the drafting clerk of the 117.C committee, whose minute reads: "The sub-clause was intended to close the matter. It has instead become the matter. I decline to open it again."

Notable applications

The Rite has been applied to holdings as various as a list of floor names, a dispute over the ownership of a staircase, and Vector Beta, which failed the fourth grade twice and was reassessed under the Rite of Local Calibration. It is not applied to persons under the Silent Cypress protocol, whose voluntary muteness interferes with the recording of intervals, and it is never applied on a floor where the cedar has not been replaced since the previous assessment. Assessors carry their own chalk for the Divan hinges. The chalk is not supplied by the Office.

Requests for assessment are made in writing and are not acknowledged. The Office receives between nine and fourteen a year and returns no more than four.