Clerks of the Ouroboros Circuit

The Clerks of the Ouroboros Circuit are the body charged with the verification, registration, and periodic re-verification of closed referential cycles falling under the Ouroboros Motif. They are seated on Floor 1,146, in the circuit of corridors from which they take their name, and they maintain the Ouroboros Almanac there. The body is not to be confused with the Clerks of the Coiled Dimension, whose work is dimensional rather than referential, nor with the Clerks of the Unblinking Eye, whose discipline concerns observation and not recurrence. The distinction is stated plainly in the Ouroboros Almanac, Preliminary Matter, and is nonetheless confused several times a year.

Establishment and Seat

The Circuit was constituted under the Seventeenth Concordance, Annex Γ, which assigned it the running of recursive equations on behalf of the wider Concordance. It was subsequently confirmed — some say re-founded, a point taken up below — under Annex Γ of the Thirty-Second Concordance. The two annexes are near-identical in their operative clauses and irreconcilable in their numbering, and the Circuit keeps both in force by the simple expedient of applying whichever annex produces the shorter register entry.

Floor 1,146 has no windows. The Circuit's scriptorium is lit by a bank of lamps arranged in a ring, a detail first noted in the inspection returns of Librarian Ospen Vey and retained in every survey since, though no ordinance requires it. Visiting clerks are asked to sign the outer register and to leave wet umbrellas at the stairhead.

Work of the Circuit

The Circuit's principal function is the identification and verification of Simple Ouroboros cycles for official recognition. A cycle is recognised when the Clerks have confirmed that its beginning and end refer to one another without the intervention of any third term; a cycle that requires a third term is returned to the petitioner with a note, and the note is not appealable. The Circuit is also responsible for verifying the conditions required for a Prophetic Ouroboros, a task it performs on a fixed schedule of four sittings per quarter and at no other time.

Under the Seventeenth Concordance, Annex Γ, Clause 8 — the Reciprocity Clause, as the Circuit's own memoranda call it — the body oversees a subset of the procedures governing the formation of The Mutual Ouroboros and is answerable for verifying their reciprocity. The Clause requires that each party to a mutual cycle be verified independently before the pair is verified jointly. In the winter of the year the Almanac records as 1,146/44, a junior clerk verified both parties in a single sitting, on the reasoning that they were in any case the same party twice. The resulting entry took nine months to unwind and is still cited in training. Clerk-Recorder Sabel has argued in the Almanac's endnotes that the Circuit's own procedure of verifying itself verifying satisfies the definition of The Simple Ouroboros, a claim the Circuit has neither accepted nor refuted, on the ground that either answer would be self-fulfilling.

Relations with other offices

Petitioners seeking recognition frequently begin in the wrong place, and the Circuit bears much of the resulting correspondence. Petitions that fail for want of a terminus are remitted to Petitions of Infinite Regress, where they are held rather than resolved. Identification disputes — which clerk, which cycle, which signature — are referred to the Office of Designation Harmonization on Circuit Epsilon within the Seventh Spiral administrative complex. The Circuit has twice declined to send a standing representative to that office, on the ground that a representative would constitute a third term.

The Circuit's relations with the Watch-Clerks are correct and distant. The Watch-Clerks observe; the Circuit recurs. Both bodies have issued guidance on which of them should be summoned when a cycle is observed recurring without having been registered, and the guidance does not agree. The Apparitor-Clerks serve the Circuit's notices and have complained, in a memorial of some length, that notices served on a cycle are returned by the cycle to the serving clerk, who is thereby served and must countersign. The Circuit's answer, recorded in its return of the same year, was that this was the point.

Dispute over precedence

Whether the Circuit was established by the Seventeenth Concordance or re-founded by the Thirty-Second is the subject of a disagreement older than any living clerk's tenure. The Clerks of the Spiral Body hold that the Thirty-Second merely restated an existing office, and read the words "shall continue to run" in Annex Γ in the continuative sense. The Circuit's own position, set out in a memorandum of the registrar and never formally amended, is that the Thirty-Second applies. The practical consequence is small: under the Seventeenth the Circuit's registers are open to inspection by the Spiral Body, and under the Thirty-Second they are open to inspection only after the inspection has been registered with the Circuit. The Circuit has adopted the Thirty-Second. The Spiral Body has continued to inspect.

"Where a cycle admits of two beginnings, both shall be entered."

— Seventeenth Concordance, Annex Γ, Clause 4

The Concordances elsewhere contradict this. Annex Γ of the Thirty-Second Concordance provides that where a cycle admits of two beginnings, the earlier shall be struck and only one entered. The Circuit has resolved the conflict by entering both and striking the register page, so that neither beginning appears and the cycle stands on record as having no origin, which several petitioners have found satisfactory.

Register of current holdings

The Circuit's active holdings on Floor 1,146, as returned in the last complete survey:

• the Ouroboros Almanac, complete to the current year, with endnotes;
• the running sheets for Annex Γ of the Thirty-Second Concordance, in four series;
• the reciprocity file under the Reciprocity Clause, sealed, with one seal broken in error and re-sealed;
• two hundred and eleven returned notices, countersigned;
• the outer register, wet.

The Circuit does not lend the Almanac. It will read from it aloud to any clerk who presents at the outer register during sitting hours, and has done so without interruption since the practice was established.