Chord Reconciliation Log

Chord Reconciliation Log is the collective designation for a sequence of bound ledgers maintained by the Chord Archive in which are recorded each instance of tonal discrepancy resolved by, or attributed to, the Chord That Reconciles. The Logs are not a single volume: the current series runs to forty-seven bindings, held in a climate-stabilised cabinet on Floor 308 adjacent to the Solar Plexus Well, and is distinct from the Chord Register kept by the night desk on Floor 88, which records chord phenomena of the Provenance Lattice and does not concern reconciliation as such. Conflation of the two is the most frequently corrected error in the Archive's reader enquiries, and a standing note in red ink on the cabinet door directs enquirers to "the other desk, the lower one, which is not this one."

Format and custody

Each entry in a Chord Reconciliation Log occupies a single ruled opening and is set out in six fields: the hour and minute of the sounding; the effective radius, stated in strides and corrected to the nearest quarter-stride; the nature of the discrepancy reconciled; the subjects affected, where identifiable; the signature of the attending reconciler; and a blank field headed Residue, which no reconciler has ever been instructed to complete but which none has seen fit to leave unruled.

The Logs are written in iron-gall ink. Entries during Reconciliation Hour are written in iron-gall ink with a margin in red, and entries made outside Reconciliation Hour — which the Fourth Concordance permits in cases of acute and unforeseen dissonance — are written in red throughout with no margin at all. Since the winter of the year the Archive counts as 3,114, the red entries have outnumbered the iron-gall ones in eleven of the fourteen bindings covering that period. No Librarian has offered a settled reading of this fact, and the Subbureau of Temporal Reconciliation has declined four times to comment on it in writing.

Origins and the Harrow Recension

The first Chord Reconciliation Log was opened on the instruction of the Seventh Concordance, Annex 2, which required that "every reconciliation be answerable to a page, and every page to a hand." The earliest binding survives only in part, water-damaged and rebound in the Harrow recension of 2,209, whose copyist — the scribe Ovellan Marth — is known to have transcribed at least three entries from memory after the originals were mislaid during a floor transfer. Marth's marginal note at folio 31 remains legible: "The radius I have set at eleven strides, though I am not certain of the weather that day."

Later recensions have retained Marth's note in full, on the reasoning of the Standing Committee on Scribal Integrity that an acknowledged uncertainty is preferable to a silent correction. This reasoning has never been formally adopted as doctrine, and two subsequent committees have attempted to overturn it.

The Vess Inquiry

The Logs became the subject of prolonged controversy following the Vess Inquiry of 2,878, convened at the request of the Archivist-Lishener after that auditor's forty-page account of the Chord That Reconciles drew attention to what the Inquiry called "the discrepancy of the discrepancy." The Archivist-Lishener had observed that the Logs record what the Chord reconciled but nowhere define the standard against which reconciliation is measured, and that the attending reconcilers appear to have judged the matter by ear.

"I have read the Log from the first binding to the forty-first, and in not one entry is the reconciled discrepancy stated in terms other than itself. The Log is a record of a bell having been rung, kept by those who rang it."

— Archivist-Lishener, report to the Vess Inquiry, section 9

The Inquiry sat for nineteen days and returned a finding that the Logs were procedurally sound. Its report, however, appended a dissenting opinion by the Librarian Cassian Orr-Vell, who held that a reconciliation felt by ear and a reconciliation recorded by ear are two different events and ought not to share a binding. Orr-Vell's dissent was entered into the Log itself, at folio 212 of binding 22, in red, without a margin, and with the Residue field left blank — the only such omission known.

Scholarly disagreement

The Fourth Concordance and the Ninth Concordance contradict one another on the Logs directly. The Fourth, Annex 6, holds that the Log is a record of effect and that its silence on cause is "a virtue of the form and not a failing of the hand." The Ninth, in a clause added at the last recension bar the numbering, holds that the Log is a record of cause and that any entry lacking a stated terminal coordinate is "a page awaiting its own reconciliation." The two annexes have been cited against one another in no fewer than six hearings, most recently in the dispute between the Chord Archive and the Subbureau over the custody of binding 33, which is water-damaged at folio 8 but otherwise held by both offices to be theirs.

A third position, associated with the followers of Kaelen Serrad, treats the Logs as a species of Chord of Reconciliation in their own right: a resonant, non-material structure generated to serve as a temporary destination for subjects with an Intent of Motion and no catalogued terminus. On this reading there are forty-seven Logs and also only one, and the bindings are the same object observed at intervals. The Chord Archive has neither endorsed nor forbidden this reading. The cabinet door note of red ink does not mention it.

Practical matters

Consultation of the Logs requires the signature of a Librarian and is conducted at the cabinet, not at a reading desk; volumes are not removed from Floor 308. Reconcilers are asked to leave the room as they found it, and in particular not to hum. Three entries in binding 41 were struck out at the request of the attending reconciler, who stated that he had recorded an intention rather than an event; the Committee on Scribal Integrity ruled that a struck entry must remain legible, and the three struck entries may be read by any holder of the appropriate signature.