Amendment 12(b).7 (Current)

Amendment 12(b).7 (Current) is a procedural amendment to the Twelfth Concordance, ratified on 3 Rainmonth, Year 704 of the Current Reckoning, and is principally remembered for having established the office of the Standing Reader. It is the amendment most frequently cited after Amendment 47 and, by the admission of the Office of Concordance Revision's own annual return, the one most frequently cited without being read.

Origins

The amendment arose from a dispute on Floor 1,144 in the winter of Year 702, when two cataloguers simultaneously asserted authority over the same shelf of unassigned holdings. Each produced a valid instrument — one citing the Fourth Concordance, Amendment Omega, the other Amendment 117.45.β — and each instrument, read alone, was unimpeachable. The dispute was referred upward four times before the Department of Temporal Reconciliation declined it on the grounds that the question was not temporal but procedural, and referred it back down.

The eventual settlement, drafted by the then–Under-Registrar Clerk Anselm Vey, was not a ruling on the merits but a provision that such a question should never again arrive without a stated first reading. Clause 7 of the amendment's twelfth bundle (rendered 12(b).7) provides that any dispute turning on two equally valid instruments shall first be read aloud in full by a designated officer, at a designated lectern, in the presence of both parties.

The Standing Reader and the lecterns

The designated officer became the Standing Reader, a post held by rotation among the floor's senior scribes. Five lecterns were installed for the purpose, of which three are in service. The lectern on Floor 1,144 was removed in Year 731 after a structural survey found the floor could not bear the assembled parties; its functions were transferred to the lectern on Floor 1,145, to which it is joined by a corridor of some forty paces. Persons crossing that corridor during a reading are required to carry nothing.

Readings are timed by the Chiaroscuro Index, not by candle-clock, so that a reading begun in poor light need not be completed before a fixed hour. Under Amendment 302-14-δ, a reading may not proceed below 72.8% fidelity; in practice this suspends most winter readings, and the Standing Reader is then required to record the postponement, in triplicate, on the lectern itself.

"Where two instruments stand equally valid, the Tower does not choose between them. It listens to them both, at length, and then chooses."

— Clerk Anselm Vey, in the preamble to the amendment

Interaction with perpetual amendment

The amendment was careful to state that a reading produces a current preference and not a final one, in keeping with the Principle of Perpetual Amendment. This has made the readings interminable, since a party dissatisfied with the outcome may petition for a fresh reading of the same instruments as soon as the Index of Ambiguity records a change in their relative standing. The practice is termed ascent against current when pursued upward and "reading again" when pursued at the same lectern; the Principle of Ascent Against Current was formally extended to cover the latter by Amendment Γ of the Ninth Concordance.

Scholars disagree about whether Vey intended the provision to be recursive. The Office of Concordance Revision holds that the loop was an oversight, citing its own memorandum OR-441, which describes the amendment as "a single hearing, not a season of them." The Bureau of Disposition Records, now the sole custodian of such matters since the dissolution of the Bureau of Validation in Year 723 of the Current Catalogue, maintains the opposite: that recursion is inherent in the Current Disposition of any instrument, and that a reading which could not be repeated would be final, and therefore void. No reconciliation of the two positions has been attempted since Year 749.

Amendment history

The fourth revision followed the Great Ambiguity Incursion, during which it was discovered that a reading had been conducted for eleven days by a scribe reading silently and nodding. Every determination issued in that period was struck from the record, a total of two, both concerning the same shelf.

Criticism and the Vey grievance

The amendment's most persistent critic was Clerk Anselm Vey himself, who spent his retirement petitioning against his own clause. His grievance, filed under Amendment 9-d (The Clarification) and still open, was that the amendment had made the Tower "a place where nothing is decided until it has been said twice, and nothing is said twice until it has been decided." Vey's petitions were rejected four times on the ground that they were themselves instruments of equal validity and must be read aloud before rejection. He died in Year 741; the petition was continued by his estate, which has never appeared at a reading.

The Standing Reader's office notes that the lecterns on Floors 1,145 and 1,146 remain in good repair and that the corridor between them is swept on the ninth of each month. Visiting parties are asked not to lean on the lectern railings, which are older than the amendment and were not built for it.