Vault of Dormant Postulates

The Vault of Dormant Postulates is a holding annex of the Observatorium of Errant Postulates on Floor 308, occupying the corridor between the Observatorium's east stair and the disused lift shaft designated Aperture A-4. It is not an archive of documents. It stores Postulates — Postulates proper, that is, propositions received for adjudication that were neither confirmed nor dismissed but indefinitely suspended — in physical form, each one coiled, sealed, and shelved pending a determination that the Vault's charter does not permit it to expect.

The distinction between the Vault of Dormant Postulates and the Vault of Dormant Humidities is frequently confused by visitors and occasionally by the Librarians themselves. The two share a donor (the bequest of Under-Secretary Halvard Quen, recorded 14 Sixthmonth by the Archive of Superseded Positions), a naming convention, and a corridor on some plans. They share nothing else. The Humidities store atmospheres; the Postulates store arguments. Neither will accept the other's overflow, a point settled only after the Winter Reallocation described below.

Origins and the Quen Bequest

The Vault did not exist before the Observatorium found itself with more suspended propositions than shelves. Submissions forwarded from every quarter of the Tower for adjudication arrived in sealed tubes and were stacked, pending, in what had previously been a stationery cupboard. By the third decade of the Observatorium's operation the cupboard had been expanded twice and the stack had begun to be described in correspondence as "the mere". The Third Concordance had established that non-manifest matters be held in stasis rather than discarded, and the Vault's founding clause simply applied that principle to argument.

Quen's bequest provided the shelving: 1,140 brass cradles, each calibrated to support a sealed postulate without imprinting so much as a crease. Quen specified in the bequest letter that the cradles be "of a height that a person may lift without assistance, as I am given to understand that assistance is not always available on the east stair."

Storage practice

Each postulate is wound onto a spool of non-porous card, sealed with the submitting office's stamp, and recorded in the Vault's register under three fields: the quarter of origin, the date of receipt, and the date on which a determination was last attempted. The last field is the source of the Vault's reputation. A postulate whose determination was attempted and abandoned is not returned to the front of the queue; it is returned to its cradle, and the failed date is simply added beneath the others. The most-annotated spool in the Vault, received from the Observatorium's northern annex, carries forty-one failed dates between 601 and 884 and has never been read to its end by any two successive custodians.

Conditions in the Vault are held steady at nine degrees and forty percent humidity. The Hygroregister principle developed for the Humidities was adapted for the Vault's purposes in 744 by the Guild of Dormant Scribes, which was at that time lending staff across floors, and the Architectural Cadence Script was used to document the shelving runs. The Guild's involvement ended in a dispute over whether an argument, once suspended, counts as a non-manifest environmental stasis. The Guild maintained that it did; the Observatorium maintained that an argument is manifest by definition and merely undecided. The Archive of Superseded Positions records the exchange in eleven folios, and the question has not been reopened.

The Winter Reallocation

In the winter of 812 the east stair froze at its fourth landing and the Vault's corridor was briefly commandeered for the transfer of humidities displaced from Sub-level 7 of the Vault of Dormant Humidities on Floor 712. Three crates of dormant humidities were left behind when the transfer was completed on 2 Secondmonth, and were not noticed until 19 Secondmonth, by which time a shelving cradle had been occupied by a coil of mist in the approximate shape of a postulate. The mist was catalogued, sealed, and is held in the Vault's south recess as an anomaly.

Concordance opinion divides on whether this object should be stored as a postulate or as a humidity. Third Concordance Annex 2 §7 holds that a matter acquires the nature of the annex in which it is lodged; Ninth Concordance Annex 1 §3 holds that a matter retains the nature it possessed on the day it was sealed. The Vault follows the Third, the Humidities follow the Ninth, and the mist remains where it was left. Custodial instruction 812/4 provides that the south recess is to be swept on the first working day of each month and that nothing is to be stored there. The mist is not discussed in the instruction.

Access and determination

The Vault is open to those with a determination in hand: a reader may request any sealed postulate provided they can name the determination they intend to attempt. In practice most requests name a determination that the requesting office has already failed, which is permitted but is noted in the register. Custodianship passed in 890 to the clerk Marrow Ainsley, who has held it since and whose grievance with the Observatorium's doorwardens — over whether a postulate read in the corridor and returned unopened must be logged — remains before the Concordance of Stair Rights.

Ainsley's ledger for the years 890 to 917 shows 2,308 requests and eleven determinations reached. Of the eleven, nine were determinations that the postulate should be returned to its submitting quarter unread, which the Vault does not count as a determination but records without argument. The remaining two are sealed, per instruction, until the offices concerned have been notified.