Clerk Soma

Clerk Soma was a Clerk of the Fourth Recension, admitted to the roll in CY 4,301 and struck from it in CY 4,330, best known as the applicant whose case in CY 4,322 produced the standardization of the Application for Recursive Leave. Soma spent the whole of his service on floors between 14,208 and 14,266, and never requested transfer. His case is cited in eleven surviving Annexes, more than any other single applicant of the fourth recension, and in no fewer than four of those the citation is used to argue the opposite of what he intended.

Service record

Soma was assigned at admission to the scriptorium of Floor 14,231 — the so-called Hanging Register — where he entered the daily catch of the Clerk of Provisional Reality into a ledger bound in three sequences that could not be read in the same order. Clerks of the Fourth Recension were expected to complete a ledger pass in nine hours; Soma routinely completed it in eleven and was commended for accuracy in CY 4,308, CY 4,311, and CY 4,319. The commendations are preserved in the Clerk-Registrar Corps returns for those years and are, by an ordinance of the ninth recension, unrevokable.

Between CY 4,319 and CY 4,322 Soma entered successive applications for recursive leave, each one seeking permission to re-enter his own completed ledger in order to correct an error he could no longer describe. The first two were refused on the grounds that the error had not been located; the third was refused on the grounds that it had. By the winter of CY 4,322 he had begun attaching the ledger to the application, on the theory that the reviewing office could say for itself what was wrong with it.

The case of CY 4,322

The application of 11 Frost, CY 4,322, ran to two hundred and forty leaves, of which the substantive request occupied one. The remaining leaves reproduced the disputed ledger. The reviewing office returned it unread, noting in the margin that "an application is not improved by the inclusion of its own subject," a formula still reproduced in the instructions printed on the reverse of the modern form. Soma appealed.

The appeal was heard by Clerk Aris, then serving as Verification Clerk and applying the Standard Authentication Matrix to incoming instruments. Aris accepted the application as properly authenticated but declined to rule on its substance, holding that recursive leave was not within his competence and that the question of competence was not within his competence either. The finding, at 4.3 of the ruling, has become the standard citation for all subsequent refusals to decide whether a thing is decidable:

"The Clerk Soma asks the office to say what is wrong with the register. The office declines, on the ground that saying so would constitute a second register, and the second would require a third."

— Clerk Aris, Ruling of 19 Frost, CY 4,322, §4.3

What followed was the standardization. The Office of the Clerk of the Threshold, which by then held final say on all applications for recursive movement, issued the Application for Recursive Leave in its first standard form on 2 Thaw, CY 4,323, fixing the number of leaves at three. Soma's own application was re-submitted on the new form, refused in the space of a morning, and never appealed.

Recurrence and the question of whether Soma left

He was dismissed from the roll in CY 4,330 on the grounds of non-attendance, having last been recorded at his desk on 30 Slate, CY 4,327. The difficulty, and the source of the scholarly dispute, is that entries in the Hanging Register continue in a hand identified as Soma's until at least CY 4,381. The hand has been disputed twice and upheld twice.

The contradiction is between the Third Concordance, Annex 6, which states that a clerk dismissed for non-attendance is "absent from the Tower and from all its floors," and the Third Concordance, Annex 11, which holds that no dismissal removes a clerk from a floor on which they are recorded, since the record is prior to the clerk. The Clerk of Eternal Recitation has ruled in favor of Annex 6 on four occasions and against it on five. No ruling has ever addressed which Annex governs the other.

The Co-locationist position

Clerk Elara took up Soma's case in CY 4,351 and made it the load-bearing example for the Co-locationist View of the Clerk's Respite — the doctrine that a clerk who continues to be recorded is not away but merely elsewhere in the record. On this view Soma is not a dismissed clerk whose ledger continues, but a clerk who has passed wholly into the ledger and is therefore still at his desk, in the only sense of "at" that survives the ninth recension. The opposing Realist school, which holds that a hand is not a clerk, has never produced a counter-reading of the register, only objections to the reading of the hand.

The Clerk-Registrar of Linear Standards has declined to endorse either view. Its circular of CY 4,364 on the matter is one sentence long and is reproduced here in full, since no paraphrase has improved it: "The question is referred to the floor."

Recorded manifestations and residual effects

Beginning around CY 4,388, Soma was reported at stations where his service record placed him in no capacity. The reports cluster on Floor 14,231 and on the Clerk Tower, the most frequently cited locus for documented manifestations of Clerk Lem, and in eleven of the nineteen motions filed under the Application for Recursive Leave after CY 4,390, his name appears where the applicant's name should be. The office treats these as clerical error. It is the only category of error the office does not require to be corrected before filing.

Two practical conventions attach to Soma and are observed without being written down. First, no ledger pass on Floor 14,231 is commenced on 11 Frost. Second, applicants citing the case of CY 4,322 are asked to cite the page and not the leaf, as the leaf is disputed. Neither convention appears in the Concordances. Both are enforced.

See also

• Application for Recursive Leave
• Clerk of the Threshold
• Clerk-Registrar Corps
• Syllabic Elision/Augmentation, whose §7 permits the elision of an applicant's name where the applicant is the case