Committee of Convergent Concerns

Constitution and Seating

The Committee of Convergent Concerns is a standing deliberative body of the Librarians, seated on Floor 31 (the Rotunda of Modest Questions), charged with deciding which matters brought before the Tower are in fact the same matter and may therefore be heard once. It was constituted under Ordinance 7 at the height of the disputes over the Committee for Non-Intersecting Jurisdictions, whose founding premise — that two offices may share a mandate provided neither touches it — the Convergent Concerns were intended to moderate rather than overturn.

Membership is by summons rather than appointment. A summoned Librarian takes the near-side chair and speaks only when both chairs are occupied; the far-side chair rotates each session. The Committee keeps no minutes, on the reasoning that two readings of a single meeting must not both be entered, and instead publishes a Single Account, prepared by Elder Verrin, whose service as Recorder has run without interruption since the winter of the Long Revision.

The Convergence of Concerns

A concern reaches the Committee in one of three conditions. Patent concerns are heard as filed. Deferred concerns are held indefinitely and are read aloud once per annum. Convergent concerns are those which, though filed separately and by unconnected parties, resolve to a single question once their respective premature sub-clauses are struck. Only the third condition is within the Committee's remit, and only it may be consolidated.

Consolidation is not merger. The Committee is emphatic on this point, and the distinction has been litigated no fewer than six times before the Sub-Committee for Dormancy Integrity. A consolidated concern retains both signatures, both seats, and both filing fees; it is heard once but recorded twice, in ink of two shades, so that a later reader may see which party was persuaded by which argument. The practice is derived from the doctrine of Non-Convergent Metrics — the concern, like the measurement, is kept in expansion rather than permitted to settle — and is believed by the Committee to be its most disciplined application.

Objection of the Curators of Coincidence

The Committee's jurisdiction abuts that of the Curators of Coincidence, who administer the Chamber of Convergent Threads on Floor 713 and object that the word convergent is now employed in two incompatible senses across the upper floors. The Curators maintain that coincidence of occurrence and coincidence of interest are distinct phenomena, and that the Committee has by consolidation claimed the second while using the vocabulary of the first.

"The Committee does not decide that two parties agree. It decides only that they must be asked the same question, and it is the question, not the parties, that has agreed."

— Elder Verrin, Single Account, Floor 31, session 481

Elder Verrin's formulation has not satisfied the Curators, who record the objection in every recension of their own register and have lately taken to filing briefs in the deferral condition, where they need not be read.

Incidents on Floor 31

In the winter of the Long Revision, two petitions were filed on consecutive mornings, the first by the Guild of Ledger-Wrights concerning the binding of provisional holdings, the second by the office of the Sexton of Leased Light concerning the wrapping of unleased lamps. The Committee declared them convergent on the ground that both concerned binding and nothing on the floor was then moving. The consolidation held for eleven days; the Sexton withdrew on the twelfth, observing that his lamps had been bound too tightly and the ledger-wrights had begun lamping their ledgers.

The Committee declined to reopen the matter and entered the withdrawal in violet, which under Concordance 8814 constitutes a finding that the concern was real but did not survive being asked. Three copies of the violet entry are kept in the Rotunda of Modest Questions, the third aisle of Floor 31, and the sub-basement stack; the third copy has never been requested.

Procedure and Prohibitions

The Committee sits on the second and fourth rotation of the floor clock, and not during the survey sweeps, when the near-side chair is required elsewhere. Consolidation requires the concurrence of both chaired members; a single dissent returns the several concerns to their separate files without prejudice, but with a note of refusal that the Committee is not obliged to explain.

Two prohibitions bind the Committee absolutely. It may not consolidate any concern touching the Sub-Bass Resonance Quotient of Floor 112, that quotient being under the standing measurement regime of another office; and it may not permit a petitioner to speak twice to the same consolidated question on the ground of having spoken once to a separate one, a manoeuvre attempted with some ingenuity by the Sexton's clerk and closed thereafter by Stage 4 of Edict 4117-γ.

Complainants are reminded that the Committee's seal is applied at the lower margin, where it may be read in the ordinary way.

Conflicting Recensions

The standard account of the Committee's foundation is Addendum 17 to the Seventh Concordance, Revision 4, which describes the body as having been "constituted to receive the overflow of convergent matters from the Curators of Coincidence" — an origin the Curators have never accepted and which the Committee's own records do not corroborate. The Third Concordance, Annex 9, gives a contrary descent, deriving the Committee from the older practice of the Committee of Necessary Splits and describing it as a split of that Committee rather than a concentration of any other office's work.

Neither reading has prevailed. The two are held concurrently upon the authority of Ordinance 7 and the permissibility of contradictory holdings reaffirmed in Conjunctive Law, and the Committee has declined, twice by formal resolution, to ask which is true. Its position — that the question of its own origin is itself non-convergent and therefore outside its remit — is entered in ink of a single shade, which is the Committee's highest form of certainty.