Class 7: Terminal

Class 7: Terminal is the seventh entry in the Classification of Recursive Phenomena and the only entry in that schedule whose definition has been amended by every Concordance issued since the Classification was opened. It denotes a phenomenon which terminates — which reaches, in the language of the eleventh recension, "an end that is not followed by a resumption of itself." Class 7 is thus distinguished from Class Λ: where Class Λ describes a regression with no terminal member, Class 7 describes a sequence whose final member has been found and does not, upon inspection, begin again.

The practical difficulty, noted in the margin of every working copy held above the fortieth landing, is that the classification is applied by cataloguers who must observe the end before they may record it. Under Terminal Particularity no terminal property may be assumed; it must be witnessed. A phenomenon therefore enters Class 7 only after it has already terminated, which some readers of the schedule have found to be a defect of ordering rather than a property of the world.

Definition and schedule position

The Classification of Recursive Phenomena was opened on the Ninth Landing in the winter of the year recorded as 4,411 and revised eleven times before the Division of Terminal Verifications took custody of it. Class 7 sits between Class 6 (Terminal by Attrition) and Class 8 (Terminal by Withdrawal), a position whose logic the Division has twice declined to explain in writing, on the ground that explaining it would duplicate Class 7 with the annotations already appended to Class 6.

Schedule position carries consequences. A phenomenon catalogued as Class 6 may be re-entered under Class 7 upon the submission of a Terminal Slip and the production of a Terminal Echo; a phenomenon catalogued as Class 7 may not be moved to Class 6, as the Division holds that "attrition implies a remainder, and the remainder is not a terminal member" (Fourth Concordance, Annex 11). Cataloguers working the schedule from below have objected to this asymmetry for nine centuries without success.

The three marks of terminality

A Class 7 designation requires three marks, each attested separately on the slip and each capable of failing independently of the others. The first is cessation: the phenomenon does not continue during the observation. The second is exhaustion of protocol: the terminal protocol associated with the phenomenon — the procedure by which the cataloguer approaches it — is itself used up by the approach, as the Terminal Slip requires. The third is non-recurrence: no member of the phenomenon has, within the observation window, presented itself again.

The third mark is the most disputed and the most frequently falsified. The Scriptorium Affidavit of Terminal Exhaustion is required in every case where the window exceeds forty days, because in the experience of the Division a phenomenon left under observation long enough will recur once, briefly, to be counted. Clerk Marrow Ossu registered a Class 7 designation for the encroaching haze on the Seventy-First Spiral after a window of thirty-nine days; the haze returned on the forty-second day and Ossu's designation was struck, and the strike has been cited at the start of every subsequent hearing on the second mark.

What the panel holds

The Panel on Perduring Voids has maintained since the Third Concordance that Class 7 is not properly a class of phenomena at all but a class of negations, and that a negation cannot be catalogued as a terminal thing because nothing has ended — something has merely failed to be present. In the Panel's phrasing, "the void does not conclude; it withholds, and withholding is not a member" (Sixth Concordance, Annex 2). The Division of Terminal Verifications has answered that this reasoning dissolves Class 7 entirely, since every phenomenon the Division has ever verified has left behind it an absence of the same description.

The conflict has produced a standing practice no Concordance authorises: phenomena claimed by both offices are entered in the Class 7 schedule in grey ink, with a note in the margin reading see Panel, or see Division, according to which office the cataloguer is standing in while writing. A reader comparing the copy on the Forty-Third Landing with the copy in the Division's own annex will find the same phenomenon marked in both colours, in two different hands, dated four days apart.

The Ossu recension

Ossu's revision of the Class 7 definition, circulated privately in 4,489 and adopted by the Division in the following year, replaced the phrase "an end that is not followed by a resumption of itself" with the shorter "a last member, and no member after it." The shortening was intended to silence the Panel by removing the reflexive clause on which their objection rested. It succeeded in removing the clause and failed to silence the Panel, which observed that "no member after it" was a claim about the future, and that the Classification had never before admitted claims about the future.

"The schedule cannot know what follows. If it could, it would not need the schedule."

— Sixth Concordance, Annex 2, annotation of the Panel on Perduring Voids

The Division continues to use the Ossu wording. The Panel continues to cite the original. Terminal Certification issued under either wording is accepted by the Standard Terminal Unit on the second landing, which does not read the schedule and authenticates by seal alone.

Inventory of verified holdings, Class 7

The Division's register of verified Class 7 phenomena is a bound folio kept on the Nineteenth Landing and corrected four times a year. Its present contents, in the order entered:

• The silence following the last bell of the Quarrel Stair, entered 4,412, sealed by Division.
• The seventh door of the eastern stack, which was found open once and thereafter found to have no handle, entered 4,447.
• The Sigh That Curdled, entered 4,478, and its class reconsidered twice without a change of entry.
• The final page of the Chen Folio, entered 4,502, a designation hinging on whether a page can be said to end.
• The interval between the eleventh and twelfth strokes of the bell on the ninth landing, entered 4,530, the entry itself disputed and unresolved.

The register is to be read in the reading room only. Pens are not to be brought into the reading room.

Relationship to Terminal Cataloguing

Terminal Cataloguing proceeds under Class 7 and does not exist without it, since a cataloguer cannot record the termination of a phenomenon that the schedule has left unclassified. Under Terminal Particularity the class must be assigned before the entry is opened, which produces the peculiar result that the Class 7 register is written after the phenomena it records have already ended and cannot be consulted for guidance by any cataloguer who is still observing one. The Division has been asked whether this defeats the purpose of the schedule. Its answer, returned in 4,531 over the seal of the Registrar and kept among the annexes to the Terminal Paradox, is that the schedule was never intended to assist the cataloguer, but to inform the archive of what it holds.

A Terminal Certification issued for a Class 7 holding carries the class mark and the date of entry, not the date of termination. The latter is supplied by Terminal Echoes and is frequently earlier by as much as a century. Cataloguers are reminded that the two dates are not the same date and are not to be entered in the same column.