Apportionment Seal

Definition and function

The Apportionment Seal is the physical instrument by which a determination of the Division of Initial Apportionment is made operative upon a dossier. It consists of a device of worked brass and a charge of vermilion wax, applied together at the moment of ruling, such that the impression left upon the parchment is simultaneously the record of the decision and the authorization for the item to move. An item bearing the Seal may pass between floors; an item lacking it may not, and the Seal-Wardens stationed at the transfer galleries are instructed to regard an unsigned dossier as immobile regardless of what its accompanying paperwork claims. The Seal is not a signature in the ordinary sense. It does not identify the clerk who pressed it. It records only that a determination was made, and it is applied over the ruling text so that any attempt to alter the words beneath the wax will lift the impression clean away.

Composition

The wax is mixed to a formula revised four times, most recently by the Seal Affixation Protocols of the 9th recension, which fixed the proportion of pigment to binder at 3:1 by weight and prohibited the substitution of any red pigment not drawn from the Vermilion Allocation held on Floor 206. Prior to that revision, the mixture was considerably softer, and a large body of Seals applied during the so-called Loose Winter — roughly three years of unheated scriptoria — have since slumped to the point where the impression reads only as a smooth disc. The Seal Integrity review of 14 cases in Floor 418's annex could not determine, for nine of them, what had been ruled. The device itself is held in the custody of the Division of Initial Apportionment and is not permitted to leave the chamber in which triage is conducted. A second, older device exists in the Hall of Equitable Procession, used by the Chamber of Equitable Apportionment on appeal. The two are of noticeably different diameters — 41 mm and 38 mm respectively — a discrepancy attributed by the custodial roll to a reshaping carried out "in the interval," a phrase the annotators of The Thirty-Seventh Concordance declined to date.

Relation to other Seals

The Apportionment Seal should not be confused with the several other sealing instruments catalogued in these pages. The Vitreous Seal is applied to apertures, not dossiers, and is made of glass. The Great Seal belongs to the Librarians as a whole and is affixed only to Concordances in their final recension. The Seal of Activation governs machinery and is applied to housing rather than parchment. The Aperture Seal Directive 7-Alpha governs a further class entirely. Readers encountering the bare phrase "the Seal" in older correspondence should assume Apportionment, though the assumption has produced at least one avoidable shipment.

Contested rulings

Where a determination is contested, the item is routed through the Chamber of Equitable Apportionment, which may sustain, overturn, or amend. An overturned ruling requires the original Seal to be struck off — a process of paring the wax from the parchment with a heated spatula, which invariably damages the ruling text beneath and leaves a pale scar the archivists call a widow's mark. The replacement Seal is then applied at a slight offset, so that a sealed-and-resealed dossier can be identified by touch alone. The most frequently cited instance remains [[In re: Aperture Seal Δ-47 (3145)], in which the offset was greater than the width of the ruling column and the two impressions overlapped in a way that permitted both readings to be defended. The case has never been settled to everyone's satisfaction and is cited approvingly by both sides.

Scholarly disagreement

The Tower's two working accounts of when the Apportionment Seal became mandatory do not agree. The first, following Clause 12 of The Thirty-Seventh Concordance, holds that the Seal was introduced alongside the Division itself and that dossiers predating the Division's establishment are simply unsealed by design. The second, following the Manual of Apposite Channels, holds that a period of some decades elapsed during which determinations were recorded by marginal annotation alone, and that the Seal was retrofitted to older dossiers in a campaign whose dates the roll does not give. The practical difference is considerable. Under the first account, an unsealed dossier is either pre-Concordance or improperly ruled, and the distinction can be settled by checking the floor's establishment date. Under the second, an unsealed dossier may be either, and the check is useless. The Division of Contextual Anchoring has operated for the present on the second account, treating unsealed dossiers as candidates for review rather than as settled cases, a practice that has generated a queue on Floor 714 currently standing at 2,140 items. Visitors to the scriptoria where Sealing is performed may observe the work from the gallery rail but may not lean upon it; the rail was rebuilt after the incident catalogued under Substrate Allocation, Annex 3.

See also

• Seal-Wardens
• Seal Affixation Protocols
• Edict of Luminous Allocation
• Manual of Apposite Channels