Aperture Gamma Proto-Register

The Aperture Gamma Proto-Register is a ledger maintained in Section Gamma's archive, in the rooms above the ledger tables of Spiral 7-Gamma, in which are recorded all apertures alleged to fall within Gamma jurisdiction, together with the evidence tendered for each allegation and the current standing of that evidence. The Register does not confirm apertures. This distinction is printed on its binding in the hand of the fourth registrar and has survived nine rebindings: the Register records claims, and the claims are the object of study. As of the most recent collation it holds 1,146 entries, of which forty-one are marked with the red wax of a confirmed aperture, three hundred and six are marked open, and the remainder are marked either held, sub judice, or, in eleven cases, withdrawn pending the return of the party. No party has returned.

Form and method of entry

Each entry occupies one verso leaf and is divided into four rules. The first names the aperture by spiral and section. The second states the resonant signature, if one has been obtained, in the notation fixed by the Third Concordance and not subsequently amended. The third names the nearest physical or archival correlate within the Tower — since the Register's revision under registrar Ovin Sall it has cross-referenced signatures with their nearest correlates rather than filing them in isolation, a change that doubled the average entry's length and halved the time required to find anything. The fourth rule carries the finding.

Entries are added in the order the claims arrive, not the order of the spirals they describe, so that the Register's sequence is a record of its own reception rather than of the Tower's geography. Clerks are instructed to leave a full leaf blank after every tenth entry. The instruction is old and its purpose is no longer stated anywhere.

The Cartilaginous Expedition

The Register's most cited annotation concerns the entry for the Spiral 44-Gamma aperture, which was tendered in the winter of the year the eastern stairs were closed for repairs and confirmed after the return of the Cartilaginous Expedition. The Expedition's finding — that the aperture's margin possessed a flexural quality that resisted measurement in any unit then in use — was entered verbatim, and the Register has since been the standard authority for the view that margins may be described without being quantified. A later hand appended four words beneath the finding: flexure not reproduced. The Expedition disputes this. The Register has not been amended.

Dispute between the registrars

Two schools claim authority over the Register's interpretation. The Proceduralist School, dominant at Spiral 7, Section Gamma, holds that the Register is a closed instrument: an aperture not entered is not within Gamma jurisdiction, however plainly it may be seen. The Correlative School holds instead that the Register is descriptive and lags its subject by however long the paperwork takes, and that a visible aperture is within jurisdiction whether or not a clerk has reached it yet.

"An aperture unentered is unadministered, and an unadministered aperture is not properly an aperture at all, but a hole with pretensions."

— Ordinance Gamma-7, clause 12, as read by the Proceduralists

The Correlatives answer with the Partial Survey of Holdings Below Spiral 77-Gamma, whose preamble confesses that the Survey was compiled from what the party could see rather than what had been registered, and which the Librarians have never withdrawn. The dispute is now older than the Register's current binding and has been referred twice to the Concordance without resolution, the two references having been answered by Concordances that contradict one another.

Relationship to the ancillary ledgers

The Register is not to be confused with the Circulation Ledger Gamma, which records the movement of persons and documents and does not concern apertures except where an aperture has moved, which is recorded in neither. Nor is it the proto-document collection of Spiral 77-Gamma, though the two are frequently shelved together and the Register's entry 88 cites a proto-document found there bearing the text of what would later become Ordinance Gamma-7, including amendment clauses not formally proposed until 1914. The Register takes no position on this. It records.

Discrepancies between the Register and the administrative returns of Aperture Gamma are resolved in favour of the Register, except where the returns are sealed, in which case they are resolved in favour of the returns. Registrars are asked to note in the margin which rule was applied. Three margins have been eaten.

Access and custody

The Register is consulted at the ledger tables by appointment, in batches of no more than three entries, with the registrar present but not seated. Members of the Cartilaginous Expedition are permitted to consult their own annotation without appointment and have done so, on average, twice a year since its entry. The Register may not be carried below Spiral 7-Gamma. It is carried down on the last day of each quarter by two clerks, neither of whom may be the registrar, and is returned the same evening.