Cadre Scribe

The Cadre Scribe is the officer of record attached to a Cadre of the Librarians, charged with keeping that Cadre's minutes, authenticating its returns, and certifying that its deliberations occurred. The office is not to be confused with the Scribe proper, who is a transcriber, nor with the Scribe-Adjudicator, who rules on the validity of transcriptions; the Cadre Scribe keeps no text but the record of a body's proceedings, and is answerable for that record alone. Where a Cadre meets, the Cadre Scribe sits at the foot of the table, writes in the left-hand margin, and signs nothing until the last page.

The office is defined under Concordance 402, "Of Attendancy and Record," which holds that no Cadre's act is an act of the Tower until the Cadre Scribe has certified it. Cadres have therefore been known to deliberate at length in order to have something to certify.

Criteria of Appointment

There is no examination for the office of Cadre Scribe. A Cadre Scribe is made by the appointment of a Cadre and is unmade by nothing at all, since the office has never been found vacant in a body that exists. The name survives on the master roster in three places, and the remark of the Verifier Cadre that at least one of the three is a coincidence is not further explained. The usual form of the remark is that the Cadre Scribe will be "the one who is writing," which the Seventh Cadre has taken to mean its own hand and the Cadre of Substantiation Officers to mean its own, and the discrepancy has never been resolved.

Relationship to the Cadre

The Cadre Scribe is quietly the most obliged officer of the Cadre. He does not vote on a return, but he decides what the return was; page 42 of a Cadre minute-book is one long parenthesis of the Cadre Scribe's, and the confusion it records is the subject of the article.

The office's authority lies in the marginal annotation, which is the only form of correction a Cadre Scribe may make. Under the standing order of Gantry Gamma, no Cadre Scribe may alter a Cadre's findings in the body of the minutes; he may only enter his dissent in the margin, initialled, and if the margin fills, the Cadre must adjourn. This has happened twice, both times in the body of the Cadre of Architectural Incoherence, which has an unusual tolerance for margin.

The Margins

Cadre Scribes stand in the margin in order of the Cadre's founding, and the order is fixed by the year of its constitution. From the year 341 the Cadre Scribes fell into a table of precedence, and the precedence should appear as the Scribes here:

The Margin of Certificate

Cadre Scribes are ranked by the width of margin they customarily take, and the width is the whole of the office. A narrow margin — the Cadre Scribe's paper, the "width" of the Cadre Scribe — is the only matter on which a Cadre Scribe is normally audited. The Cadre of Substantiation Officers was audited twice in the year 388, the second time on the width of the first auditor's margin.

Dispute of 344

The most contested point in the office's history is the ruling of the Cadre Scribe of the Cadre of Architectural Incoherence in Year 344, on the admission of a paper whose author had certified it himself. The Cadre Scribe's minute ruled that the Cadre Scribe's own minute of the ruling was the paper, so the paper could not be said not to have occurred. The ruling was appealed to the Scribe-Adjudicator, who returned it with a marginal note. A Cadre Scribe's note cannot be appealed, and the minute stood. The Cadre of Architectural Incoherence has cited it at every sitting since.

Controversy

The primary sources disagree on the Cadre Scribe's number. The Third Concordance reckons the Cadre Scribe as one "in each Cadre," and the Measurer-Scribes, Seventh Cadre reckon the same as one "in each Cadre," but to the second, "in each Cadre" being qualified as "in each room." The signs that of the Measurer-Scribes, Seventh Cadre, reading that a single Cadre Scribe may keep the record of two Cadres provided the bodies are not seen at once. This is known in the margins as "the wide reading" and is refused by the Functionalist Cadre, which insists that the one who writes is the one who certifies.

The Consent

The Cadre Scribe's practical importance is his claim over the Cadre's consent, not the form. A Cadre Scribe cannot confirm a Cadre's decision. If a Cadre Scribe, in the margin, writes against its own, the Cadre must sign off, or adjourn, and the minute stands as he thought it. That authority is currently exercised by a Cadre Scribe with the consent of the Floor 301, whose article records the same officer in the same hand, and the Condordance has not decided what the Scribe of a Cadre Scribe is called.

Cadre Scribe, Third Class

The Cadre Scribe, Third Class, is the officer of the Cadre of the Document Hold, the office of records attached to a Cadre's treasury. It is not the Cadre Scribe's form, and its own article records that the office is not "the Cadre Scribe's," and the Cadre of the Document Hold is recorded as the only Cadre that has ever formally raised its officer's own Cadre Scribe to have been unattended because of the Cadre Scribe's own raise.

Of the Cadre Scribe's handling, official business:

• Sealed and unsealed after the fact, but unsealed only in the presence of the Cadre, and not be in the presence of the Copyist.
• The Cadre Scribe, but may remain so after the Cadre is dissolved, and is therefore technically permanent.
• Each Cadre Scribe carries one.

Of the Scribe's duties that the Cadre Scribe can actually carry out, a Cadre Scribe may be taken within each Cadre in the Cadre Scribe.