ConcordanceĠ42-A

ConcordanceĠ42-A is a supplementary instrument of the Concordance Amendment Tracking series, ratified on 14 Ventose in the forty-first year of the Registry of Standing Instruments and appended, at the time of its promulgation, to nothing at all. Its full title, as recorded in the Roll of Instruments Sealed, reads: ConcordanceĠ42-A, Being an Instrument Supplementary to Concordance 42, Wherever That May Be Found, and In Any Case Operative Until Such Time as Concordance 42 Is Located. The peculiar diacritic following the numeral — a mark unique in the instrument register, resembling a small raised hook — is not decorative. Under the standing rules of the Scriptorium of Numeral Marks, it distinguishes a concordance appended to a numbering from a concordance appended after one, a distinction the Tower maintains with some ferocity and no observable consequence.

Origin and the Missing Parent

The circumstances of the instrument's drafting are unusually well documented. On 9 Ventose, the Bureau of Numeric Sequence certified that the number 42 had been assigned to an instrument whose text could not be produced, whose sealing clerk could not be named, and whose entry in the Floor Register of Instruments consisted of a single ruled line and the annotation held in abeyance. Rather than retire the number — a procedure requiring the assent of the Concordance Reconciliation desk and, in practice, eleven years — the Bureau elected to issue a supplementary instrument in the vacant slot, on the reasoning that a number with a subordinate attached is easier to defend than a number alone.

The instrument was drafted by Clerk-Adjunct Neris Vaunt, whose private memorial of the affair (Vaunt Papers, Folio 6) records that she wrote the entire text in a single sitting and then spent four months defending the diacritic before the Committee on Instrument Orthography. The Committee's ruling of 22 Germinal upheld the mark by a margin of one, the deciding vote cast by a member who had been absent for the preceding three sessions and voted, by his own later admission, for the mark he found least legible.

Relation to Concordance 42

ConcordanceĠ42-A opens with the standard reciprocal-clause formula and closes, at §9, with the admission that the parent instrument has not been inspected. The formula nonetheless binds. Under Concordance 7, §2, any instrument that declares itself supplementary to another inherits that other's effective date; ConcordanceĠ42-A therefore purports to have taken effect on a date it cannot verify and which, on the best reckoning of the Chronological Office, precedes the founding of the Bureau that issued it. Concordance 33 cross-references Concordance 7 extensively on precisely this point and does not resolve it.

The instrument has been read as extending the force of Concordance 23 to a numbering it does not name, and equally as a quiet repeal of the same. Neither reading is recorded as authoritative. The Concordance Reconciliation desk, asked in Year 44 to state which, replied that the question fell under Concordance 244 and was accordingly out of scope. A second enquiry, in Year 46, received the same answer in the same hand.

The Amendment of Year 51

In Year 51 a marginal amendment was entered into the working copy held on Floor 611, striking the phrase wherever that may be found and substituting which is presumed to exist. The amendment was properly sealed but never transcribed into the master recension, and the two texts have diverged since. The divergence became acute in Year 63, when a reader relying on the working copy cited the presumption as settled law before the Assizes of the Middle Spiral; counsel relying on the master recension demonstrated that the phrase did not exist in the instrument at all, and the reader was fined the cost of the copy.

"The Tower does not require that a number have a document. It requires only that the document say which number it does not have."

— Concordance Reconciliation, advisory note of Year 39, appended to the file of ConcordanceĠ42-A

Scholarly Disagreement

The principal dispute concerns whether ConcordanceĠ42-A is a concordance at all. The School of Instrumental Descent holds that it is a placeholder in the form of an instrument — a document whose entire function is to occupy a number — and that its substantive clauses are ceremonial. Against this, the Vaunt Reading, advanced by the clerks of the Lower Scriptorium, maintains that the instrument is fully operative and that its silence on the content of Concordance 42 is a deliberate legislative choice rather than an absence. The Vaunt Reading has the advantage of being the position of the instrument's author; it has the disadvantage of requiring that a document be read for what it declines to say.

A minority position, associated with the Annex Gamma commentators, proposes that Concordance 42 did once exist and was superseded by Concordance 23 before the Bureau's certification, leaving ConcordanceĠ42-A supplementary to an instrument that had already ceased. This view is not widely held and cannot be tested, since the certification of Year 41 records the number as never having been sealed.

Access and Handling

The master recension is held in the Vault of Supplementary Instruments, Case 42-A, and may be consulted by sealed request. The working copy remains on Floor 611 and is available without appointment. Readers are asked not to annotate the working copy further; the marginal hand of Year 51 has not been identified, and the Committee on Instrument Orthography prefers that it remain singular.