Chronometrics Guild

The Chronometrics Guild was a chartered body of the Tower, active from the reign of the Eleventh Concordance until its dissolution under the Forty-Second, and is chiefly remembered as the original keeper of the primary temporal spool for Aperture Omega. At its height the Guild held forty-one floors in the middle band of the Tower and employed, by its own count, some nine hundred spoolwrights, ratchet-clerks and interval-notaries. Its charter was never formally revoked; the Guild instead lapsed, which the Tower distinguishes carefully from abolition, and which is why a small office on Floor 1122 continues to answer correspondence addressed to it.

Foundation and early charter

The Guild was constituted by a charter of the Eleventh Concordance, appended without debate to a schedule concerning weights and measures. The charter's operative sentence is only nineteen words long: "The keeping of intervals is entrusted to the Chronometrics Guild, and their spools shall be received where spools are received." From so slender a grant the Guild derived four centuries of authority, on the argument that the receipt of spools implied the certification of spools, and the certification of spools implied jurisdiction over all intervals whatever their origin.

This reading was not contested for two hundred years. It was first questioned by the Metrology Annex in a memorandum of the ninth month, which observed that the charter said nothing about certification at all. The Guild's reply, circulated to every floor between the annexes, ran to eighty pages and never addressed the point.

The primary spool of Aperture Omega

The Guild's central instrument was the spool designated Spool Omega-Prime, a copper-and-horn assembly some two and a half metres in diameter, housed from the beginning in the chamber beneath Aperture Omega and tended in shifts without interruption for three hundred and eleven years. The spool did not measure time; the Tower has never needed an instrument for that. It recorded the intervals between decisions, a quantity the Guild maintained was the only one on which the Tower's administration could be said to depend.

In the winter of the year recorded as 1122 (the Guild's own reckoning, disputed), a ratchet-clerk named Ovarin Scept filed the first of what became known as the Interval Grievances, arguing that the spool's readings for the third quarter were inconsistent with the readings for the second, and that the discrepancy was not an error but a fact the Guild had suppressed. Scept was reassigned to the flood register on Floor 40. His grievance, however, was bound into the ledger, and the binding survives.

"The spool does not err. If the spool appears to err, the appearance is an interval, and intervals are what the Guild keeps. The complaint is accordingly recorded as a spool reading and filed with the other readings."

— Chronometrics Guild, Reply to the Interval Grievances, folio 3

Jurisdictional disputes

The Guild's most persistent adversary was the Chronometrics Wing, founded on Floor 606 by Clause 44 of the Seventh Concordance as a body to deal with temporal phenomena deemed impossible under the frameworks of the Third Concordance. The two institutions were not rival instruments but rival attitudes: the Guild held that every interval could be spooled, while the Wing held that some intervals could not be said to have occurred at all and should be entered in the Index of Untenable Pasts or the Registry of Disallowed Futures instead. The Guild regarded both registers as a filing system for things that had not happened, and said so, repeatedly, in writing, on good paper.

Matters were not improved by the Wing's adherence to the Modal School on the interpretation of Clause 881.09 of the Seventh Concordance and its refusal to attribute the clause to Wren of the Spiral Stair. The Guild had attributed it to Wren for a century and had a plate made. The plate was returned.

The Guild also quarrelled at intervals with the Guild of Harmonic Theorists over whether a period could be said to have a pitch, and with the Theoretical Jurisprudence Guild over the standing of the Reflector Guild, which the Chronometrics Guild declined to recognise as a guild at all on the ground that its members produced no spools. The Reflector Guild's counter-argument — that a reflection is an interval between an object and its image — was conceded in 1340 and then withdrawn in 1342.

Dissolution

The Forty-Second Concordance transferred the keeping of Spool Omega-Prime to a board of custodians and said nothing about the Guild that had kept it. The omission was read, correctly, as a sentence of lapse. The last master of the Guild, Hesper Anwell, signed the transfer in a single line and appended a note requesting that the spool's maintenance schedule be preserved. The schedule was preserved. Anwell was not.

What survives of the Guild is its archive, its plate collection, and a maintenance instruction still observed by the custodians of Aperture Omega, which requires that the spool chamber be swept on the first working day of each quarter and that no one speak while it is swept. The instruction is posted inside the door. It is not attributed, but the hand is Anwell's.

Conflicting accounts

Two questions remain unsettled. The first is the date of dissolution. The Forty-Second Concordance is itself undated in every recension but one, and the dated recension, held on Floor 606, gives a year forty years earlier than the Guild's own final ledger. Scholars of the Margin Commentators Guild have argued that the ledger is the later document and therefore the more reliable; the Dialectic Guild has argued the reverse; both cite the Constructivist Guild in support, which the Constructivist Guild denies.

The second question is whether the Guild ever had a hall. No fabric account, no key register, and no inventory of furniture survives, yet the Guild Hall records a standing booking in the Guild's name for the second and fourth days of each week, kept up for nineteen years after the Guild is said to have lapsed. The booking was cancelled by a clerk whose name is not recorded, and the cancellation is the last entry in the register.