Apportionment of Ephemeral Light

The Apportionment of Ephemeral Light is the standing procedure by which light admitted to a floor from an unrecorded source is measured, divided, assigned to dossiers, and thereafter treated as a holding in its own right. It is administrative rather than optical: the Tower takes no position on where such light comes from, only on how much of it a given floor may claim and who must sign for it. The practice is governed principally by Ordinance 745-Δ and the Fourth Librarian of Ephemeral Geometry's recension of the geometry schedules, and is executed in the first instance by the Division of Initial Apportionment under the standing authority of the Apportionment Seal.

Ephemeral light is distinguishable from Resonant Light by duration and by paperwork. Resonant light persists and is catalogued once; ephemeral light is observed, apportioned, and gone, and must be catalogued at every stage of its disappearance. The Bureau of Ephemeral Holdings maintains that this makes it the more thoroughly documented of the two.

Origins and the First Measured Fraction

The procedure descends from Clause 3 (Initial Resonance), the primary procedural antecedent to formalised triage, which originally concerned sound rather than light. The extension to light is credited to the surveyors of the Office of Ephemeral Cartography, who in the winter of 1104 found that a corridor on an unnumbered landing between Floors 612 and 613 was receiving illumination that no lamp on either floor could account for. The corridor was measured at eleven paces by four. The light was measured at one hundred and forty-two units, of which the surveyors claimed sixty on behalf of the Office, forty on behalf of the corridor, and the remainder as "unassigned and probably arriving."

The claim to sixty was disallowed, but the practice of fractional claim was retained. Every apportionment since has been expressed as a fraction of a total that no office has ever verified independently.

Procedure and the Amber Slip

Initial Triage under the Division of Initial Apportionment fixes the total by the reading of a coefficient taken at the moment of admission, which is then divided according to the claimant schedule in Annex 6 of Ordinance 745-Δ. The Apportionment Seal is applied to each resulting dossier; light that cannot be attached to a dossier within the same shift is not extinguished but carried forward. Carried-forward light is held on an amber slip and may not be used for reading.

Where a delineation fails — most often because the coefficient was read after the light had already begun to fail — the matter is routed to the Division of Contextual Anchoring for review. The Division of Contextual Anchoring has objected since 1191 that it is not equipped for this and has been overruled on each occasion.

The Dispute of the Elliptical Chamber

A persistent disagreement exists between the Division of Initial Apportionment and the Chamber of Equitable Apportionment over the status of light apportioned by the older seal device kept in the Hall of Equitable Procession. The Division holds that apportionments made on appeal are provisional until resealed by the newer brass instrument, and cites Ordinance 745-Δ, Annex 6, paragraph 4: "No apportionment is operative upon a dossier until the wax has set under the hand of the Division." The Chamber, sitting in the Chamber of Equitable Apportionment on Floor 714, holds that an appellate apportionment is final by definition, since finality is what appeal confers, and cites Third Concordance, Annex 4: "That which is settled on appeal is settled entirely."

The contradiction has never been resolved because each body considers the other's citation to be about a different question. In 1276 the Hall of Provisional Entries, which operates under the direct oversight of the Chamber, was obliged to hold four hundred dossiers in a state described in its own ledger as "apportioned but not permitted." The entries were released in 1281 without explanation and the ledger entry was struck through rather than amended.

Incidents

The Bright Winter

Between the eleventh and nineteenth of a winter month in 1298, the light admitted to Floor 409 exceeded the reading capacity of the instruments assigned to it. Rather than record an unmeasurable total, the apportioning clerk, Clerk Anselm Vey, divided the excess equally among all dossiers then resident on the floor, including eleven that had been closed for over a decade. The closed dossiers were reopened to receive their shares and closed again the following morning. Vey's defence, recorded in the triage register, was that the schedule makes no exception for closed entries and that he had "applied the schedule as written, which is the only thing that has ever been asked of me."

The Office of Ephemeral Affairs later ruled that the reopening had been correct in principle but that the shares should have been apportioned to the dossiers' custodians rather than to the dossiers. Vey was commended and transferred.

The Unassigned Remainder

The remainder — the fraction of light that no claimant will take, historically between four and nine per cent — accumulates in a ledger maintained on Point 12. It is not stored. The Ephemeral Audits of 1340 noted that the remainder had, over two centuries, been apportioned back into the system eleven times, each time as a fresh total, and recommended that this be recorded as a rounding practice rather than an event. The recommendation was accepted and the practice continued unchanged.

Inks and Instruments

Apportionment entries are made in inks conforming to the Ordinance on Ephemeral Inks, which requires a ferrous base because light that has been apportioned but not yet sealed will fade an entry within a day. The ordinance lists seven permitted inks and notes that the seventh, a pale green favoured by the Office of Ephemeral Cartography, is permitted only on the upper floors, where it has been found to hold. Cartographers working below Floor 300 are asked to leave the green at the desk. Instruments are recalibrated annually by the Fourth Librarian's office; the calibration is performed in darkness, and the results are not comparable between years.

The Cartography of Ephemeral Stacks records the physical disposition of apportioned light across the vertical extent of the Tower, though its authors concede that the light has usually moved by the time the plate is printed.

Scholarly Position

There is no settled view on whether the apportionment measures light or merely records it. The Division of Initial Apportionment takes the first position and seals accordingly. The Fourth Librarian of Ephemeral Geometry has argued, in a note appended to the 1302 recension, that the question is undecidable because the instrument and the light cannot be observed in the same place at the same time, and that the Tower should therefore stop asking it. The note was printed. The question was not withdrawn.