Confluence Analysis

Confluence Analysis is the discipline concerned with the identification, classification, and adjudication of intangible confluences — those junctions at which two or more procedural, documentary, or atmospheric currents meet and produce an effect not attributable to any one of them singly. It is distinguished from Convergence Analysis, which studies currents that arrive at a common terminus, and from Contingency Cascade Analysis, which studies sequences in which each event compels the next. Confluence Analysis is concerned only with the meeting-point itself, and with what the meeting-point does to the things that meet there.

The discipline is taught, proctored, and largely disputed on Floor 306, where the Department of Confluence Analysis maintains its reading rooms under the proctorship of Archivist-Lieutenant M. Kael. It draws its methods from Substance Analysis and its evidentiary habits from Precedential Analysis, though practitioners in both parent fields have objected, at intervals, to the borrowing.

Origins and the Logistical Precedent

The discipline's founding instrument is a maintenance complaint. In the winter of the year recorded as 4,112 by the internal reckoning, the wardens of Stairwell 44 reported that travellers descending between landings were arriving at floors they had not requested, and that the landings themselves appeared to have been visited out of order. The complaint was referred upward and eventually reached the Bureau of Precedential Analysis, which declined to treat the matter spatially. In its ruling, the Bureau held that Stairwell 44 was a "persistent procedural confluence" rather than a spatial anomaly, and that the disorder arose not from the stairwell but from the collision of two filing conventions meeting within it.

"The stairwell does not move. The stairwell is where two registries touch, and neither will yield its numbering."

— Bureau of Precedential Analysis, Ruling 44-C, appended to Stairwell 44

The ruling created a class of object that had not previously existed in Tower law: the confluence, which is real, locatable, and yet not a place in the ordinary sense. Stairwell 44 has since been catalogued as both a stairwell and a confluence, and visitors are asked not to use it for descent while the question is before the Bureau. It remains the most-cited case in the field.

The Floor 306 Apparatus

The Department of Confluence Analysis on Floor 306 operates a suite of instruments for the measurement of confluences, of which the best known is the Delta-Sigma Capillary Cluster — a bank of capillary tubes of graduated bore through which a sample current is drawn and its meeting behaviour recorded. The Cluster is calibrated quarterly against a reference confluence maintained in the Department's east reading room. The reference confluence has not been moved since 4,119, and staff are reminded that it may not be used to shelve books.

Supplementary apparatus includes the aperture tables of the Vector Analysis School and a standing set of precedential indices compiled under Crossconcordance Analysis. Results are recorded on Bureau of Registry Docket Form Ir 9 and filed within the quarter, or, where a confluence is disputed, within the quarter after that.

Disputed Jurisdiction

Confluence Analysis is unusual among the Tower's analytical disciplines in that it does not own its own subject. The Department of Confluence Analysis claims authority over intangible confluences by the terms of its founding instrument; the Bureau of Precedential Analysis claims the same authority through its oversight of Gap Analysis, on the reasoning that a confluence is simply a gap with more than one occupant. The two positions have never been reconciled, and the Third Concordance does not settle them.

Matters were not improved by the Crossconcordance Analysis of 4,087, which found that the relevant clauses of the Third Concordance and the Ninth Concordance contradict one another on the question of which office may certify a confluence as persistent. The Ninth holds that certification rests with the surveying office; the Third assigns it to the office that first recorded the confluence. Where the recording office and the surveying office differ — which is the usual case — the two Concordances cannot both be obeyed. The Archivist-Specialist (Valence) has noted in the Departmental register that the contradiction is itself a confluence, and that the Department lacks jurisdiction to hear it.

Method and the Mellified Cases

Practice proceeds in three movements, though practitioners vary in how strictly they separate them: the confluence is first located, then classified by the currents that compose it, then assessed for persistence. Assessment is the delicate step. A confluence that disperses within a single sitting is termed ephemeral and is recorded only in the daily ledger. One that survives across sittings is persistent and enters the main catalogue. One that survives despite the removal of its constituent currents is termed binding, and falls under the doctrine of Binding Absence.

The Melancholy Estuary Series provided the field's most difficult classification. The Series, comprising eleven confluences recorded along the salt passages of the lower flood floors, resisted assessment for some years owing to the humidity, which swelled the capillary tubes and distorted the bore readings. The Department's eventual solution — to record the Series only in dry weather, and to note the weather in the margin — was criticised by the Vector Analysis School as "a method of waiting dressed as a method of measurement" (Memorandum of the School, 4,124). The Department has not withdrawn the practice.

Criticism

The Substantialists, championed by the Bureau of Precedential Analysis, hold that every certified confluence must be shown to consist of substances capable of being named and weighed, and that the Department's willingness to certify confluences composed of nothing but two filing conventions is an abdication. Archivist-Lieutenant M. Kael has answered that the Substantialist position would unmake Stairwell 44, and that the wardens of that stairwell have enough to bear already.

A smaller objection concerns Kaelen Moss, whose herbarium notes are frequently cited in the Department's atmospheric work despite the notes never having been filed under the correct docket form. The Department has ruled that they may nonetheless be relied upon where no other record survives, a concession that the Bureau of Registry has described, in its own register, as "regrettable and final."

Confluence Analysis remains, by its own account, a discipline awaiting its own definition. The Department's standing notice on the matter, posted at the head of the Floor 306 stair, reads in full: Visitors are requested to remain in one current at a time.