Anti-Reflection Statutes

The Anti-Reflection Statutes are the collective body of Concordance-derived instruments regulating the presence, measurement, and management of reflective materials within administrative and archival zones of The Tower. They are administered chiefly by the Anglesmiths, a sub-guild of the Logic Guild, and are cited more frequently than any other class of statute excepting the Anti-Drift Measures. The Statutes are not a single document. Successive recensions have accumulated since the promulgation of the Third Anti-Reflection Statute on 14th Ventose, Cycle 712, and the numbering of the individual Statutes bears no relation to their order of enactment, their present force, or their physical position in the Register of Ephemeral Statutes — from which, despite repeated petition, they have never been transferred.

Composition and numbering

Eleven Statutes are presently in force. They are designated by ordinal — the First through the Nineteenth — with the gaps at Four, Six, Nine, Eleven, Fourteen and Seventeen left by instruments repealed under the obsolete statutes procedure and never renumbered, on the ground that renumbering would oblige the recalculation of every marginal citation in the working copies. The Librarians have twice considered a consolidated edition and twice declined it.

The Third remains the principal regulatory instrument, and the only one to have been the subject of a formal interpretive dispute. The others address narrow matters: the First governs the dimensions of permitted bevel; the Eighth the disposition of reflected light falling on stairwells above the fortieth floor; the Twelfth the treatment of polished stone in corridors not designated Anti Corridors. The Nineteenth, enacted 3 Brumaire, Cycle 944, concerns itself entirely with the registration of lenses of less than two millimetres diameter and has never been applied, no such lens having been presented for registration.

The Third Statute and the Anglesmiths

The Third Anti-Reflection Statute grants the Anglesmiths authority to register, coat, or sequester reflective surfaces, and mandates one of these three treatments for any surface capable of returning a measurable image. Its enabling authority derives from Clause 7 of the Third Concordance, a provision whose drafting is generally held to be defective: the Clause speaks of "surfaces which return the likeness of a thing to a place other than the place of the thing," a formula that the Anglesmiths interpret as covering mirrors and that the Negativists have long argued excludes them.

"The Statute was not written to be read by us. It was written to be read by a mirror, and a mirror reads only itself, which is the difficulty entire."

— Marginalia attributed to Registrar Ovin Halt, working copy of the Third Statute, aperture gamma

Compliance with the Third is achieved in most cases by coating, and in the case of the Seventeen Mirrors of Partial Reflection by the housing in which the Mirrors are kept — a solution accepted by the Anglesmiths as early as Cycle 715 and still cited in the survey manuals as the model of a tidy disposition.

The question of reflected paper

The Statutes' most durable controversy concerns whether a reflection of a document is itself a document. The Anglesmiths hold that it is not, and may be dispersed without registration. The office of the Stilled Light holds that it is, and that a reflected page falls under the ordinary deposit rule. The dispute dates to the winter of Cycle 781, when a clerk of the fourth scriptorium — the records name her as Ilse Corrin, though the register of that office spells it Corin — registered the reflection of a title deed and was fined for registering a subject that did not exist, the reflection having been dispersed by an usher in the same hour.

Corrin's subsequent memorial, filed over nine Cycles, argued that the fine could not stand because the object registered had been dispersed before the fine was levied, and that a thing cannot be fined for existing and dispersed for not existing in the same afternoon. The Anglesmiths conceded the point without conceding the principle, refunded the sum, and amended the Eighth Statute to permit retroactive dispersal. Corrin was not consulted on the amendment and did not file again.

Anti-Reflection and anti-drift

The Anti-Reflection Statutes are frequently confused with the Anti-Drift Measures, and the confusion is not wholly without foundation. Both bodies restrain catalogued subjects from leaving their recorded positions; both are enforced in the Anti Corridors; both are invoked, in practice, by the same under-ushers. The distinction is that the Anti-Drift Measures concern movement and the Anti-Reflection Statutes concern duplication — a drifting subject arrives somewhere it is not recorded, while a reflected subject is recorded in two places at once and may be said never to arrive at all.

The Gegenton Array is the usual instrument of reconciliation where the two bodies conflict, and its logs are the only reliable record of how often they do.

Maintenance

Statutory coatings are renewed on a four-Cycle rota by the Anglesmiths' own hands, and the rota is posted at the head of each Anti Corridor. Visitors are asked not to test the coatings with a fingertip.