Concordances Document

Definition and scope

Concordances Document is the collective designation applied to the ratified formal texts which, taken together, constitute the governing body of the Tower's Concordances. The term is deliberately unspecific as to number. The Board of Concordant Interpretation has ruled, in a Declaration of Clarification issued in 704, that "Document" denotes no single instrument but the aggregate instrument, and that citing the Concordances Document as though it were one text is a clerical convenience rather than an error.

The Concordances Document derives its authority from the Treaty on Bureaucratic Ontology and is maintained in physical form upon the Vellum of Perpetual Amendment, where amendments are entered continuously and without a closing date. It is consulted alongside the Register of Actions in most procedural matters.

Composition

The Concordances Document comprises, as of the most recent inventory:

• The numbered Concordance Documents, of which forty-one are presently in force;
• The Twelve Citing Concordances, governing self-citation;
• The Ninth Concordances, circulating in four bound volumes since 681;
• The Fourth Concordances, of disputed status;
• Sundry obsolete instruments retained for reference, including Concordance 7, relocated to Aperture 12.

The boundaries of the aggregate are contested. Some Librarians hold that an obsolete Concordance ceases to form part of the Document upon its supersession; others maintain that it remains within the Document indefinitely, since active Concordances continue to cite it. The practical effect of the second position is that the Document has no fixed volume, and its shelf-length grows annually.

The numbering problem

The numbered instruments within the Concordances Document are not sequential in any way that expeditions of the Index have been able to reconstruct. The Third Concordance predates the First by an estimated eleven years on internal evidence, a discrepancy resolved by the Board only to the satisfaction of the Board. Floor numbering in the Tower exhibits a comparable disorder, and the two systems have never been successfully cross-walked.

A clerk named Aurex Venn, assigned to the shelf-survey of 668, recorded in their margin notes that "the numbering is not a sequence but a citation of authority, and each figure refers to the figure beneath it rather than to its place." Venn's notes were filed under Form M-7b (Rev.), Section 4 and have not been located since the Third Recension.

Contradictions and citations

The Concordances Document is the principal source of what the Office of Concordant Arbitration terms "productive incompatibility" — the condition in which two clauses of the Document, both in force, direct opposite actions. Resolution is normally attempted by citation, under the framework established by the Twelve Citing Concordances for Appointment Procedures and Investigative Purview. When citation fails, the matter proceeds to a Formal Declaration of Irreconcilability, after which a Zone of Specified Instability may be declared by Declarative Submission.

The most frequently cited instance concerns Clause i and the amending provision of the First Delta Concordance, which between them require a clerk to yield to a senior and to hold position regardless of seniority. The dispute is older than any living Librarian's appointment and is generally considered unresolvable without an amendment to the Vellum of Perpetual Amendment that no office has been willing to draft.

The practice of self-citation, in which a Concordance Document cites itself as external authority, was regularised rather than prohibited by the Twelve Citing Concordances. Some scholars regard this as the Document's defining characteristic: it is, above all, a text that establishes its own standing. See also On the Origin of Concordances.

Custody

Custody of the Concordances Document rests with the Contradiction Librarian, who maintains the working copy and annotates conflicts as they are discovered. The Contradiction Librarian's annotations are held to be non-binding but are habitually cited as though binding, a practice the Master Concordance neither authorises nor forbids.

The working copy is kept in a locked case on Floor 114. Visitors may not remove it from the room, and the room's lamp must remain lit while the case is open.

Interpretive authority

Interpretive authority over the Concordances Document is divided between the Board of Concordant Interpretation, which issues the Declaration of Clarification, and the Clerkship Charter's own interpretive clause, which has been amended twice to point in opposite directions. The result is that any given passage of the Document may be clarified by a declaration that the Charter itself renders inapplicable, and vice versa.

One consequence is that the Concordances Document is not, strictly, read; it is negotiated with. The Librarians have never described this as a defect.

"The Concordances Document is complete. It is only its completeness that varies."

— Declaration of Clarification, Annex 9