Concordance 1-ω

Concordance 1-ω (read aloud as "one through omega," and never as "one minus omega") is the designation given to a continuous body of Concordance text occupying the whole of the Forty-Eleventh Landing, a broad shelf some eleven metres below the Gallery of Unclaimed Preambles. It is not a document in the ordinary sense. It has no beginning, no end, no covers, and no single hand; it is instead a single unbroken line of amendment running the length of the landing's inner wall, beginning at a mark scratched as 1 and terminating, after an extent last surveyed at 402 metres, in the Greek letter omega. Between those two points the text is administered as one instrument.

The Clerk-Recorder's office classifies Concordance 1-ω as a continuous concordance, a category with only four current members. Citation of it is permitted in disputes of the sixth order and below, though the Bureau of Citation Practice advises that the designation be quoted in full, since the abbreviation "1-ω" has twice been mistaken for a floor number and once for a delivery code.

Physical description

The text is incised, not inked, into a grey laminate that resists replacement. Lettering below the two-hundredth metre is noticeably larger, consistent with a period in which the landing was read by torchlight; the final third is set in the compressed hand of the Narrow Registry Script, whose abbreviations are still taught on the landing but not elsewhere. Amendments since the Concordance Update Y54315445 have been added in a third and looser hand, pressed into the laminate with a stylus of procurement grade B rather than cut.

Three apertures interrupt the line: the alpha aperture at the 61-metre mark, beta at 188 metres, and gamma at 377 metres. Each is sealed and each is annotated with the words reserved, see opposite. No reader has established what is opposite. The landing has one wall.

Content and internal structure

Concordance 1-ω is not a sequence of numbered clauses. It is a single sentence, amended in place, of which the operative verb has been struck through and re-supplied at least nine times. The Office of Grammatical Standing has ruled that the sentence nonetheless remains valid, on the ground that Concordance 3 established the doctrine of surviving predicate: a clause whose verb is struck retains its force until a replacement verb is supplied, and indefinitely thereafter if the replacement is also struck.

Interspersed among the amendments are 40 marginal notes of varying length, of which 31 are signed with the same initial, R. The Index of Marginal Hands treats these as the work of a single reviser active across a period it declines to date, on the ground that the notes contradict one another too frequently to be the work of several people.

Relationship to the numbered Concordances

Concordance 1-ω is frequently confused with the numbered instruments. It is not part of the sequence running through The First Concordance, the Third Concordance, and the Fifteenth Concordance, and it is not one of the subordinate annexes such as Third Concordance, Annex VII. The distinction is maintained in the register by an entry noting that Concordance 1-ω was never promulgated, only found.

It does, however, cross-reference the numbered body extensively. Concordance 22 is named at the 94-metre mark, Concordance 23 at 95 metres, Concordance IX at 210 metres, and The Seventh Concordance four times between 240 and 300 metres. No reference to the Second Concordance appears anywhere in the line, a silence the Committee on Supersession Records has read as evidence that the 1-ω text was compiled after The Fifth Concordance but before the Concordance Reconciliation — a window it places, with customary confidence, between "late" and "later."

Dispute: whether 1-ω is a Concordance at all

Two readings prevail. The first, defended in the Standing Memorandum on Continuous Instruments and by the Clerk-Recorder's office, holds that Concordance 1-ω is a Concordance by possession: it is on a landing, it is maintained by the order, and it is amended. Under this reading the designation is descriptive rather than constitutive.

The second, advanced by the Lost Concordance Faction in the period before its reclassification efforts were nullified by the Concordance Update Y54315445, held that 1-ω is the original instrument, from which the numbered Concordances were abstracted, and that its designation encodes this: 1 for first, omega for last, with everything between to be understood as commentary. The faction's opponents have observed that this reading requires the numeral 1 to predate the First Concordance, which the Concordance Amendment Tracking register does not support. The faction has replied that the register is a late fabrication. The register has not replied.

"If the line is unbroken, it has no clauses, and if it has no clauses it cannot be cited. Cite it anyway."

Reading protocol and access

Access to the Forty-Eleventh Landing is granted by ticket only, in blocks of forty minutes, with a maximum of two readers on the wall at once. Readers are issued one lens of the third grade and a numbered stylus; the stylus must be returned. Writing on the laminate is prohibited except by amendment, and amendments require a second reader to witness, which is why the block permits two.

The Reading Order of Amended Text requires that a continuous concordance be read from 1 toward omega and never in reverse, on the ground that reverse reading of an amended sentence produces meanings the Tower has agreed not to hold. Two readers in the current survey have requested an exception in order to recover the struck verbs. Both requests are pending. The office notes, without further comment, that the last recorded entry in the line remains unfinished: a single word has been begun and not completed, at the 402nd metre, and no reader has agreed on what the word is.