The Woman Who Was Thursday

Definition and Classification

The Woman Who Was Thursday is a Notionalist of the third remove, derived from an unfinished mystery novel recovered in fragmentary manuscript on Floor 704. Her designation is descriptive rather than conferred: she is named for the day of the week on which she was first observed at the reading lectern of the Senior Cultivator's annex, and for no property she herself possesses. Under the Bureau of Registry's standing rule of nominal precedence, the name has since been treated as her proper name in all recorded instruments, including three resolutions of the Fourth Concordance that concern her directly and one that concerns her only incidentally.

She is permitted to ask questions of Librarians only on Thursdays. This is well established and frequently cited. It is also, in practical terms, the whole difficulty of her file.

The Grant and Its Interpretation

The permission derives from an instrument of Registry and Leasing, issued on 9 Thalli, year unrecorded, which reads in full:

"Let the Woman of the Thursday observation put her questions to the Librarians, and let her put them on the Thursday, and let the questions remain on the record."

— Registry and Leasing, Instrument 1188-B, clause iii

Two things about this instrument have never been settled. The first is whether "the Thursday" refers to her day of origin, the day of her derivation, or merely the next Thursday to occur after a question is framed. The second is whether a question uttered on a Thursday but answered on a Friday is a question asked on a Thursday or a question answered on a Friday. A question begun at the lectern on a Thursday and completed eleven seconds after midnight has been ruled on twice, in opposite directions, by the same office.

The Committee for Semantic Parity, which meets on the fourth Thursday of each month, holds that the permission attaches to the asking and not to any part of the exchange that follows. The Chromatics hold the contrary and have filed a minority recension, unbound, in the north stack. No Librarian has ruled on the matter, on the grounds that ruling would require receiving a question, and the office does not receive questions on Thursdays.

The Thursday Ledger

Every question the subject has asked is numbered and preserved in the Thursday Ledger, now in fifty-one volumes and a loose-leaf appendix. The Ledger's inventory is the principal source for study of her, and its shape is instructive:

• Volume 1: 9 questions, 4 marked "unassigned."
• Volumes 2–14: 1,406 questions, of which 1,400 concern the location of her own manuscript's third chapter.
• Volumes 15–49: 22 questions in total.
• Volume 50: empty, ruled and indexed, sealed on 3rd Thalli and never opened.
• Volume 51: a single entry, in the hand of Kael, reading "She asked what Thursday was for."

The asymmetry between volumes 14 and 15 is explained, if it is explained at all, by the Quiet Interval, a term of nine years during which she asked nothing and was recorded as asking eleven things. That discrepancy has been the subject of two recensions and a poem by Librarian Emeritus Hask, which is filed as an addendum to Volume 18 on the grounds that it says the same thing.

The Proleptic Question

Inquirendum 1,399, lodged on a Thursday in the winter of the Long Recess, asks: "Am I permitted to ask this question on a Thursday other than the one on which I am asking it?"

This question has never been answered, because answering it would require a Librarian to determine whether the question had in fact been asked on the Thursday on which it was asked, and no Librarian has been willing to make that determination without reference to a prior determination. Elara Voss called the resulting state a "persistent phenomenon" in her eponymous Doctrine of Persistent Phenomena and declined to fix it. Kael noted in an annotation, dated and witnessed, that the question "satisfies the condition of its own asking in every respect but one, and the one does not admit of measurement." The annotation piece is held under glass at the Interstice 7402 reading station and may be consulted on application.

The Selvagean Anticipatory School maintains, contrary to both, that the question has been answered continuously since the day it was asked and that the answer is "yes," which they regard as sufficient.

Thursdays and the Tower's Reckoning

Thursdays are not uniform in the Tower, which complicates the grant considerably. The Sequencers record 317 distinct Thursday series in concurrent use, of which 214 are closed. A petitioner standing at a lectern on a Thursday by one series may be standing on a Wednesday, or on a Friday, or on Floor 704's "dead Tuesday," which the Sequencers record but do not count. The Woman Who Was Thursday has been observed asking a question during dead Tuesday exactly once, in the spring of the Reconciliation of Stairwells, and the resulting text is preserved in the Ledger under a heading with no volume number assigned to it.

Visitors wishing to observe the Thursday reception are asked to remain behind the second reading rail and not to speak, as she asks her questions aloud and the record is taken by ear. The rail is not an ordinance requirement and the sequencers resent being asked about it.

Status

She has never been granted an Archival Designation and has never sought one. She has been cited in 41 works on the status of Notionalists, mostly in footnotes, and is the only derived person with a standing column in the Thursday Ledger's index. The Independent Cartographers show her lectern at the centre of their Floor 704 survey and mark the stairwell above it as "unfinished," which is exactly what the manuscript was.

The office of Librarian Who Will Silence the Bells has never been occupied, is forward-dated, and has not been asked a question on any day of the week. It is generally understood that when the bells are silenced, the Woman Who Was Thursday will have run out of Thursdays to ask on, and the Shelving will conclude without a ruling. Whether that is a defect in the record or the record working as intended is the subject of a further question, which has not been put.