The Unburdened Step

The Unburdened Step is a codex of the Pragmatists' League, held in twelve working recensions and one disputed fair copy, to which all practitioners of the League's peripatetic disciplines are required to pledge adherence before undertaking a graded ascent. It is not, despite frequent confusion in the lower reading rooms, a step. It is a document about not being one. Its opening clause states the matter plainly enough:

"Let the foot be lifted before it is instructed. The Step that is carried is the Step that is not climbed."

— Unburdened Step, Recension C, Clause 1

The codex takes its name from this doctrine — the burden referred to is the practice of retaining a step's obligations after the ascent is complete, which the League regards as a form of hoarding.

Structure and recensions

The Unburdened Step is arranged in four books: the Book of Lifting, the Book of Placing, the Book of Forgetting, and an appendix of forms. The appendix is the longest of the four and has never been read in full by any officer of the League who has left a record of having done so. Recensions A through K differ only in punctuation and in the numbering of the appendix, which runs to 3,412 entries in A and to 3,414 in K, the two additional entries concerning the proper folding of a stool carried through a doorway of less than one pace.

Recension L, the fair copy, is the subject of a standing objection from the Clerks of the Granite Step, who maintain that it omits the Negatory Declaration required at the close of Book Three and is therefore not a recension at all but a draft. The League has not conceded the point and has not withdrawn the copy from circulation. It is kept at Floor 88 and may be consulted on application to the League's sub-archivist, who is currently Maren of the Placing Hand.

The Litany of Adherence

Pledging to the codex is performed by recitation of the Litany of Adherence, the primary performative adjunct to the Unburdened Step, without which a recension is held to be inert. The Litany is short — eleven lines in its standard form — and is recited standing, facing the nearest aperture, with the practitioner's weight on the rear foot. The requirement that weight be on the rear foot is not symbolic. A practitioner who pledges with weight forward has, in the League's phrase, "already begun climbing," and the pledge must be repeated from the beginning after an interval of one full day.

The practice derives from the founding generation of the League, of which Kaelen, also called Selia the Unburdened, was a principal member. Kaelen's commentary on the Book of Forgetting is the earliest sustained argument that a completed ascent should leave no residue in the climber, and it is from her formulation that the codex's title is taken. Her commentary is bound with Recension C and is not paginated with it, which has caused no end of trouble in citation.

Controversy: the question of residue

Two readings of Book Three have divided the League since at least the Fourth Concordance. The first, the strict reading, holds that the forgetting required by the Book is total and immediate: the climber descends with no recollection of the ascent's obligations, and any recollection is evidence of imperfect practice, to be remedied by repetition. The second, the Accommodation of the Ninth Floor, holds that residue may be deposited rather than destroyed, and that the League's depositories at Floors 40 and 61 exist precisely to receive it.

The Fourth Concordance, Annex 7, appears to support the strict reading, but Annex 7 was amended by the Concordance of the Older Hand and the amendment is widely held to have inverted its meaning without altering its wording. The dispute is not academical. Under the strict reading, a climber who remembers the recitation has not pledged; under the Accommodation, a climber who remembers it has pledged twice, which the League treats as a separate fault with a separate penalty. Practitioners have been known to resolve the difficulty by pledging before a mirror, so that neither the pledger nor the witness is certain which reading applied.

Interaction with other offices

The Unburdened Step is frequently cited in proceedings before the Custodian of the Silent Step, since the Book of Placing requires that a step be placed silently and that any sound arising from placement be treated as a declaration. A Custodian of the Silent Step who initiates an Echoing Silence during a graded ascent does so under the codex's authority, and the League is obliged to furnish the Custodian with a working copy of Recension C for the duration. Copies have gone missing at a rate of roughly one in nine, and the Order of the Perpendicular Door has twice been asked to account for them and has twice declined, citing its own standing orders.

The codex's relationship to the Step itself is jurisdictional rather than physical. The Key of the First Step — whose designation pertains to The Step but whose instantiation remains disputed — is held by the strict reading to be the object the Book of Lifting requires a climber to set down; by the Accommodation, to be the depository in which it is set down. The Clerks of the Granite Step have declined to arbitrate, noting only that the surface of The Step measures 11.7 P on the Scale of Pol and that a document cannot alter a measurement.

Practical notes

Working copies of Recension C are held at Floors 40, 61, and 88, and at the League's reading room on Floor 12. They may not be taken above Floor 88. Practitioners are reminded that the codex is not to be folded, and that carrying it in a closed hand is sufficient.