Clerk-Provisional Aris Thorn

Clerk-Provisional Aris Thorn is the designation presently attached to the custodianship of the Collection of Unallocated Doors, a post held on a provisional basis since the fourth recension of the Register of Provisional Custodians and renewed without recorded interruption for nineteen consecutive audit cycles. The designation is unusual in that it is not, strictly speaking, a rank. A Clerk-Provisional is a clerk whose promotion has been recommended but not executed, and who is therefore empowered to perform the duties of an office without conveying any of its privileges to a successor. Clerk-Provisional Aris Thorn has performed those duties continuously and at length.

Custodianship of the Collection

The Collection of Unallocated Doors comprises some nine hundred apertures recovered from floors where they do not belong, or belonging to floors that no longer exist, or of a provenance that the Office of Floor Registers declines to certify. The custodian's charge is to hold each door in the position of least ambiguity until such time as it can be reassigned. Clerk-Provisional Aris Thorn has held the collection for the entire period of record and has reassigned, by the most generous reading of the ledger, eleven doors.

The appointment was made under Concordance CV-412, which permits the Prefect of Provisional Holdings to name a clerk of insufficient seniority to a post no qualified clerk will accept. The annex to CV-412 anticipates that such appointments will last "no more than one season of inventory." The Concordance on the Term of Provisional Offices later fixed the maximum term at three cycles, and the Fourth Concordance, Annex 9, withdraws that limit entirely for posts designated "unclaimed and unclaimable." These three provisions have been read together since the Quiet Session of the Inner Stair, and the resulting reading is not uniform.

The Pre-Validation Survey

Clerk-Provisional Aris Thorn is the principal surviving example of a Clerk-Provisional who documents aperture parameters during the Pre-Validation Survey — the procedure by which a newly surfaced door is measured, sounded, and provisionally named before any validation authority is asked to rule on whether it is a door at all. The parameters recorded by Clerk-Provisional Aris Thorn in the survey of the winter of the seventeenth cycle are the model from which the Manual of Tangible Verification was later compiled.

The survey is at its most delicate where apertures resist measurement. The Standing Instruction on Apertures of Unstable Width directs that such a door be measured at the frame, at the threshold, and "at the width the door believes itself to be," and that all three figures be entered. Clerk-Provisional Aris Thorn is credited in Ruling CV-881 with the practice of entering the third figure in a distinct hand. The practice has since been adopted by fourteen custodians and abandoned by nine.

The Discrepancy

The designation is entangled with the matter known as the Aris Thorn Discrepancy, in which a Clerk-Provisional named Aris Thorn discovered multiple personnel entries bearing their name and raised the irregularity in the required form. The entries — a curator of the Paradoxon Collection, a Prefect whose petition to be recognized as the administrative heir to Prefect Aris Thorn was denied, an archivist-provisional, and a junior librarian of the West Stack — were never reconciled. The Aris Reconciliation of the following declension assigned each entry to a separate ledger, which resolved the appearance of duplication without resolving the duplication.

"The Discrepancy is not an error in the record. It is the record's own account of itself, which the record is not obliged to simplify."

— Aris Reconciliation, Recital 4

Scholars differ sharply on what has occurred. The Librarians of the Lower Annex hold, in a marginal note to the Reconciliation, that a single clerk has served all four postings and that the entries record successive rather than concurrent service. The Office of Personnel Recension rejects this reading on the ground that the postings overlap by forty years. A third view, advanced by the Committee on Duplicated Designations and never formally withdrawn, holds that the question is improperly constituted: an entry in the personnel register attests to the existence of an entry, and nothing further may be inferred from it.

Protocol Suggestion 412

The one documented act of this custodianship outside the collection itself is Protocol Suggestion 412, a proposal that every unallocated door be given a provisional designation at first survey and a permanent one only at reassignment. The suggestion was entered by Clerk-Provisional Aris Thorn and has never been adopted, never rejected, and never scheduled. It remains before the Standing Committee on Provisional Nomenclature, where it is regularly cited and never reached.

Clerk-Provisional Aris Thorn is recorded as having catalogued the door designated Ψ-412-4.7-AT under the procedure proposed in the suggestion, a fact noted in the survey ledger without comment. The door has since been opened. The opening was, under the terms of Concordance CV-412, Annex 6, immediately reclassified as a survey.

Current Standing

Petitions for the designation's termination have been filed four times, most recently under Petition for Designation Continuance 771-Alpha, which sought instead to make the post heritable and was granted in the form of a renewal. The Librarians have not stated the membership of the review panel that renews the appointment. Inquiries on the point are answered by citation to the Second Concordance, Annex 11, which is addressed to a different question.

Clerk-Provisional Aris Thorn continues to hold the keys to the collection, which number eleven and are kept in a drawer beneath the ledger. The drawer is not locked. Custodians have twice petitioned to have the keys numbered by a separate clerk, and both petitions are pending.