Concordance 17, Annex G, Clause 4

Concordance 17, Annex G, Clause 4 is the clause of the Seventeenth Concordance that designates, and thereby creates, the condition known throughout the Tower as Simultaneous Veracity. It provides that a statement may be held true in more than one register of the archive at the same instant, provided the registers in question have been sealed within the same bell. The clause is short — four lines in the authorized recension, six in the working copy kept at the East Reading Desk — and it has generated more commentary per line than any provision of the Concordances except the Erasure clause itself.

The text, as sealed, reads in part:

"Where two entries assert the same matter, neither shall be preferred on the ground of its register; the matter shall stand true in both, and the archivist shall enter both without annotation, and shall not divide them by nightfall."

— Concordance 17, Annex G, Clause 4

The final prohibition — against division by nightfall — is the clause's operative heart and the source of nearly all subsequent dispute. It has never been agreed what "nightfall" means in a building with no exterior and no sky.

Origin and sealing

Clause 4 was drafted in the winter following the Recension of the Nineteen Bell, when the West Registers and the Stairwell Registers each held a complete account of the same expedition and could not agree which was the record of it. Rather than choose, the drafting committee — chaired, as the minutes record, by the Under-Librarian of Coincident Holdings — declared both true and closed the session early so that neither register could be amended before sealing. The clause preserves that manoeuvre as general law.

It is frequently confused with the later amendment at Seventh Concordance, Annex D, Clause 1, which also concerns the reconciliation of duplicate entries. The distinction is that Clause 4 permits simultaneous truth where entries already exist, while the Seventh Concordance's provision governs what may be entered at all. Clerks who confuse the two are reminded, in the Notice to Junior Archivists issued each spring, that "one admits the twins; the other decides whether they shall be born."

Application and the nine-folio question

In practice the clause is invoked most often when a floor is catalogued twice by two expeditions working in ignorance of each other. The resulting pairs of entries are called concurrent folios, and the clause requires them to be bound together with a linen tape rather than filed in sequence. The tape is removed only by the Office of Binding, whose records indicate that it has been removed eleven times in four hundred years and reinstated nine times.

Whether the clause extends to the annexes of the entries it protects was settled, apparently, by the Fourth Concordance, Annex Sigma, which holds that "the protection of the entry extends to its shadow." This phrase has been read as extending protection to annexes and also, by the Revisionists of the South Stack, as meaning nothing whatever. The question is not closed.

Contradictions in the record

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns whether Simultaneous Veracity may survive the sealing of a third register. Concordance 17, Annex G, Clause 4 states only "two." The Eleventh Concordance, Clause 209, however, speaks of "a plurality of concurrent registers, however numerous," and the Twelfth Concordance, Annex Gamma, Clause 22 goes further, requiring that a matter held true in three or more registers be "copied entire into each, which copying shall count as one entry for the purposes of all later recensions."

The Second Concordance, Annex 4, Clause 12 takes the opposite position, asserting that "no matter shall stand true in more than two registers at once, the third being by its nature a correction." No Librarian has reconciled these texts, and the practice of the Office of Binding suggests the disagreement is unresolved in fact as well as in doctrine: the office maintains separate tape for pairs, triples, and "irregulars."

The Stain Clause and the Query Text

Clause 4 is read almost always alongside The Stain Clause, which governs what may be written over an entry whose ink has run. Because a stain is not an amendment, the stain neither confirms nor denies simultaneous truth; the clause simply continues to apply beneath it. Archivists are instructed to note a stain in the margin but not to count it as one of the registers.

The relationship to the Query Text defined at Seventh Concordance, Annex D, Clause 1 is less tidy. A query entered against a pair of concurrent folios returns both, and the query itself then becomes a third assertion of the matter — which, under the reading of the Revisionists, converts a valid pair into an invalid plurality at the moment of asking. The Office of Queries has responded by requiring that queries be addressed to the tape rather than to the entries. Compliance is not universal.

Measurement and the static registers

Clause 4 has no stated duration, and this omission was addressed only obliquely, in the Static Measurement codified at Seventh Concordance, Annex Δ, Clause 11. The Static Measurement fixes the interval during which a concurrent pair must remain undisturbed before the truth is considered settled. It is measured in bells. A pair sealed at the Sixteenth Bell and left untroubled through the Nineteenth Bell is generally accepted as settled; a pair disturbed at the seventeenth must begin again, and the linen tape must be re-tied by a different clerk. Moss-Growth Spirelocation, mandated by Concordance 114, Annex 7, Clause 22.b, is sometimes used to establish how long a tape has stood, though the moss does not grow on linen and the method is disputed.

Practical notes

The clause is cited in disputes over cataloguing priority more than any other provision of the Seventeenth Concordance. The Concordance of Concordances lists it under "clauses whose citation settles a matter without being read." Its most frequent citation is in the form "Clause 4, Annex G, Seventeenth" — never "Clause G, Annex 4," which denotes an entirely different instrument and has caused two resignations.

Readers consulting the clause in the reading rooms are asked to request both recensions, as the authorized and working copies differ in punctuation and the punctuation has been argued. The working copy may not be taken to the fourth floor. Queries concerning the tape should be directed to the Office of Binding, which does not answer them by post.