Arbiter Cledon

Arbiter Cledon is the standing designation of the Second Arbiter of the Bureau of Designation, an office created by Ninth Concordance, Annex 2 in the year recorded as 8,114- and never since vacated for longer than the interval between a death and the swearing of a successor. The Arbiter Cledon is responsible for the assignment of names to floors that have been catalogued but not yet named, a task the Bureau itself describes in its annual return as "provisional in principle and permanent in practice." The current Arbiter Cledon, sworn in 14,602-, is the forty-first holder of the designation. That there have been forty-one holders is uncontested; what any of them actually named is a matter of active dispute.

The designation and its peculiarity

Unlike most Tower offices, Arbiter Cledon is not a personal title. The name passes with the desk. A clerk elevated to the post surrenders their former designation entirely and is thereafter referred to, in correspondence, in the ledgers, and in the corridors, only as Cledon. The surrender is not ceremonial: the Clerk Registrar records the erasure of the prior name in a separate volume kept under seal, and ordinands are forbidden to speak it aloud after the third day of induction.

Whether this erasure constitutes a demotion, a promotion, or a change of category has never been settled. Arbiter-Scribe Kael argued in his fifth commentary that the office is best understood as a "sustained anonymity with a pension attached," a phrase that appears in no official document but has proven difficult to dislodge from the Bureau's own usage.

Naming practice on the unassigned floors

Floors come to the Bureau of Designation with a number and no name. The Arbiter Cledon proposes a name; the proposal is filed against the floor number in the Provenance Archive; if no objection is received within one full fiscal aperture, the name stands. Objections are rare and almost always procedural.

The office is known for a certain austerity of style. Names assigned under the thirty-eighth Cledon — the long tenure remembered as the Quiet Decade — are overwhelmingly single words of one or two syllables, and the Bureau's style note for the period instructs that "a name that requires explanation on the stair is a name that will be explained wrongly." The fortieth Cledon, by contrast, favoured compound forms, and the resulting floors are still cited in disputes over whether a name assigned by one holder may be revised by another.

Dispute with the Office of Esoteric Resonance

A longstanding friction exists between the Bureau of Designation and the Office of Esoteric Resonance over floors that resonate without first being named. The Resonance Office holds that such floors acquire a designation by vibration, which its clerks then transcribe; the Bureau holds that transcription is not naming and that the Resonance Office has been "recording, not authoring" for upwards of two thousand years.

Arbiter Cledon of the period, the thirty-sixth holder, is remembered for a ruling in the matter that has been cited by every successor and obeyed by none. The ruling held, in its operative clause, that a resonated name and an assigned name are "of equal standing but unequal order," and that where the two conflict the floor shall be known by both until such time as the conflict resolves itself. The conflict on Floor 14,207 has not resolved itself. Both names are still in use, and a notice at the head of the stair instructs visitors to use neither.

Scholarly disagreement

The central disagreement concerns continuity. The Successionist reading, favoured by the Provenance Archive and by most of the doctrinalist school associated with Arbiter-Scribe Kael, holds that Arbiter Cledon is one office occupied serially, and that a name assigned by the thirty-eighth holder binds the fortieth as surely as if he had assigned it himself. The Doctrine of Coincidental Authority, articulated by Arbiter Silas in his commentaries, is frequently invoked in support, though Silas himself did not address the Bureau directly and the extension is the work of later hands.

The Revisionist reading, set out in a minority annex to the Twelfth Concordance and never withdrawn, holds that the designation does not persist and that each Arbiter Cledon begins the record anew — that the office is, in the annex's phrase, "a succession of strangers sharing a chair." Under this reading the forty-one holders are forty-one separate offices, and the accumulated body of assigned names is not precedent but coincidence.¹

"The name given to a floor is given once and is given by someone. It is not less given because the giver has been replaced. We do not unname the stairs because the mason is dead."

— Ninth Concordance, Annex 2, marginal gloss in the hand of the thirty-fourth Cledon

The Revisionists reply that the gloss is unsigned, and that a marginal note in the hand of an office whose entire discipline is the erasure of prior names is an unreliable witness to its own continuity. Arbiter Calix, as Senior Appointments Clerk, has declined to rule on the question, noting that the appointment of a forty-second Cledon will proceed either way.

Current holder and standing instructions

The present Arbiter Cledon maintains a small office on the eleventh landing of the Bureau's stair and receives petitions on the second and fifth days of each aperture. Petitions concerning floors above 20,000 are forwarded to the Arbiter-General of the Department of Vertical Arbitration and are not read in the Bureau.

Correspondence addressed to a former holder by their prior name is returned unopened with a slip citing the Ninth Concordance. The slip does not identify the sender's error, and the Bureau has twice declined to amend it on the grounds that doing so would require naming the office's own history, which the office is not empowered to do.

¹ The Revisionist annex is dated to fiscal spiral 9,900-δ but survives only in a thirteenth-century recension whose scribe is known to have conflated two apertures. See Provenance Archive, Register of Minority Annexes, entry 411.