Transferability

Transferability is the property, once held to be universal among Tower instruments, by which an inscribed accountability may pass from one bearer to another. It is catalogued under the Doctrine of Non-Transferability, which does not so much refute it as forbid it, and the two are conventionally shelved together; the Ancillary Register keeps its Transferability holdings facing inward, so that the two spines cannot be read from the same side of the shelf.

The distinction is maintained with some care. Transferability is a quality that a document or office may possess; the Doctrine is a standing instruction that no such quality be exercised. Most instruments in the Tower remain, in principle, transferable. They simply do not transfer. Visiting readers are asked not to test this on the premises.

Origin and the First Concordance

The concept enters the record with the First Concordance, Article 11, which provides that "an accountability duly inscribed may be assumed by any party who presents the inscription entire and unaltered" (First Concordance, Art. 11). For the better part of a century this was read as a licence. Offices bartered obligations across floors; a Standing Request could be sold, inherited, or left in a stairwell with a note. By the recension of the Third Concordance the practice had grown sufficiently disorderly that Article 11 was amended to read "may be assumed by the party so designated at inscription, and no other," a change of four words that has occupied the Bureau of Volitional Acts for two hundred and forty years.

The Doctrine and its reach

The Doctrine of Non-Transferability closes the question at the level of inscription: an accountability, once written, cannot be amended, reassigned, or voided by later explanation or circumstance. It does not deny that documents change hands. It denies that the accountability changes hands with them. A clerk who inherits a docketed intent alongside a desk inherits the desk. The intent stays where it was docketed.

"The paper may travel. The burden does not travel with it."

— Bureau of Volitional Acts, Ruling 88-C, on the Ambulation of Instruments

The ruling is cited in nearly every dispute on the subject and has been read both ways in the same decade. Its defenders hold that it settles the matter. Its critics observe that it says nothing about what happens when the paper is lost, which is the only case that ever comes before the Bureau.

Dispute: the Theta Question

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns the artefacts catalogued as Ambivalent Artefacts, Class Theta. Theta objects are recorded as holding two accountabilities at once, in alternation, and the question is whether this constitutes transfer. The school of Annex Theta maintains that alternation is not transfer, since neither accountability departs its bearer; it merely waits. The opposing position, associated with the Register of Manifestations and set out at length in its 9th fascicle, holds that a Theta object in its second state is a different bearer, and that the Doctrine therefore applies at the moment of alternation and forbids it — a reading which, if adopted, would require the withdrawal of every Theta holding from circulation, a step the Irregular Acquisitions office has twice proposed and twice deferred.

A third view, advanced by the clerk Sennet Ardlaw in a marginal note now bound into the Master Register of Volition at folio 412, argues that the dispute is unresolvable because the Theta objects were never inscribed to begin with. Ardlaw's note is unsigned. The Librarians have declined to strike it.

The Ardlaw Grievance

Ardlaw's grievance is the standard illustration of the doctrine in practice. In the winter of the year recorded as 6 Gamma, a consignment of inscribed slates was moved from a scriptorium on a lower floor to a reading room three flights above, where a fire in the flue made the lower stack unusable. The slates arrived intact. The accountabilities did not, and forty-one clerks spent the season answering for obligations that had, by every physical measure, been carried upstairs by hand.

Ardlaw, then a junior in the Biographical Register's collation office, petitioned for a clarification. The petition was granted, the clarification issued, and the clarification itself transferred — by a courier who carried it to the wrong floor — and was thereafter held to bind a different office entirely. Ardlaw's grievance, filed in protest, is the only document in the affair that has never left its drawer. It is frequently cited as proof of the rule. Ardlaw cited it as proof of something else, and left the Tower's service without recording which.

Practical notes

Transfers of instruments between floors are recorded in the Materials Register, which notes the movement of the object and, in a separate column, the movement of any accountability, the second column being in practice left blank. The Axiom of Documented Intent is often invoked by parties who believe the blank column to be an error rather than a finding. It is a finding.

Where an instrument is deposited in the Register of Ephemeral Statutes it is treated as having never carried an accountability at all, and the question of transfer does not arise. This is the only clean resolution the Tower recognises, and it is available only to statutes, which are not instruments in the relevant sense, though the Register of Unanswered Questions records no fewer than nine attempts to establish otherwise.

Couriers moving inscribed material between floors are reminded to use the north stair, as the south landing is under repair.