Whispering Appendix

The Whispering Appendix is the archival designation for the acoustic supplement bound into certain recensions of the Nineteenth Concordance, and, by extension, for the body of proleptic recitation said to occur within it without a reader. It is not to be confused with The Whisper Appendix, a disputed bibliographical designation with which it shares a name, a subject, and a long and unresolved quarrel over precedence. The Cataloguing Office distinguishes the two by the presence or absence of a physical quire: the Whispering Appendix exists and can be weighed.

Description and binding

The Whispering Appendix comprises forty-one leaves of laid paper, bound in the standard manner described under Sewn Appendix and affixed to the verso of the Nineteenth Concordance's final gathering on the fourth of Marrow, 3,988, by the scriptorium of the Lower Aris. Unlike a Clasped Appendix, it cannot be removed without cutting the binding thread, a prohibition the Office of Annex Concordance has twice attempted to relax and twice withdrawn. Its stock is heavier than the parent document's by eleven pennyweights per quire, a discrepancy attributed by the binders to the acoustic sizing applied to the inner margin.

The leaves are ruled but blank from folio 3 to folio 39. The intervening folios carry a single column of notational marks — not text — which the Office of Aural Registry classifies as recitation scaffolding. Readers report that the blank leaves murmur. The murmur is not intelligible as speech and does not repeat.

Function and the proleptic whispers

The Whispering Appendix is the second of the two instruments by which the Tower regulates what are called proleptic whispers: statements recorded before they are made, which the Appendix is understood to hold in suspension until made. The first consolidating instrument was Whisper Appendix, Vol. 4, and the Appendix claims continuity with it in its opening rubric. In practice the Appendix does not so much store such statements as decline to release them, and the distinction has generated most of the secondary literature.

"The Appendix shall hold in suspension all utterances not yet uttered, and shall release none of them before their utterance; and the holding shall not be construed as an utterance."

— Nineteenth Concordance, Annex 3, clause 7

The Census of the Whispering Stacks records a related auditory anomaly in the Aris Spire in its 127th Cycle appendix, and later annotators have treated the two phenomena as cognate. The Office of Aural Registry has declined to rule on the question, noting only that the Spire anomaly occurred in a stairwell and the Appendix anomaly in a book, and that the Office does not hold jurisdiction over stairwells.

Incident of the eleventh of Marrow

On the eleventh of Marrow, 4,092 — the same day on which Appendix Δ was sewn into the Thirteenth Concordance — a copyist of the fourth gallery, Theodora Vant, reported that folios 22 through 27 of the Whispering Appendix had recited a list of names in her own hand, in the order in which she would later write them. Vant's account was taken under seal by Auditor-Ordinary Pesk, who found the leaves dry, the binding intact, and Vant's testimony consistent across four sittings.

Pesk's report recommended that the Appendix be opened only in the presence of two witnesses who could not read. The recommendation was never adopted, on the grounds that the witnesses would be unable to confirm what they had not read, and the Appendix has since been consulted by readers in the ordinary way. Vant was reassigned to the Ninth Spiral and is not recorded as having recanted.

Scholarly disagreement

Two positions obtain. The first, held by the Office of Annex Concordance and set out in its memorandum of 4,101, maintains that the Whispering Appendix is a distinct instrument, physically sewn and independently weightable, and that its resemblance to The Whisper Appendix is a matter of shared subject and nothing more. The second, advanced by the recensionist Halder Quince, argues that the Whispering Appendix is the surviving physical residue of a document that was never produced — that it is, in effect, the body of a missing annex — and that the Office of Annex Concordance has confused a quire with a doctrine.

The Fourth Concordance, Appendix Ω is sometimes adduced on Quince's side, as it was adduced in the earlier search for the subject matter of Appendix Δ; the analogy has not been accepted. The Office of Annex Concordance has ruled, without argument, that documents and the absence of documents are not the same class of thing, and that the comparison therefore fails at the outset. Quince has requested a hearing on the ruling in each of the last six cycles. The hearings have not been held.

Access and handling

The Appendix is held in the Aural Reading Room on floor 6,017 and is consulted by appointment. Readers are asked to sit at the marked table and to read no further than folio 21 aloud. The room is not swept between appointments.

The Appendix is cross-referenced under Appendix and is not to be shelved adjacent to Appendix Omega, with which it has been confused four times since 4,064. Whether the murmur constitutes recitation within the meaning of the Twenty-Ninth Concordance remains formally unresolved; the Office of Aural Registry has asked that the question not be put to it again this cycle.