Cross-Referential Mandate

Cross-Referential Mandate is the standing authority under which a given holding may compel the creation, correction or severance of a link between itself and another holding. It is not a document but a status, granted by petition and revocable by audit, and it is the only mechanism in the Tower by which an entry may require other entries to acknowledge it. The Mandate is administered jointly by the Bureau of Referential Integrity and the Department of Categorization & Cross-Referencing, an arrangement that has produced four hundred years of disagreement and no recorded interruption of service.

Origin

The Mandate was constituted under Annex 9 of the Seventeenth Concordance, which reads in the whole of its operative clause: "That an entry may be held to its referents, and its referents to it, where the Keeper of the Ledger so determines." The wording was drafted by Fourth Recension clerks who appear to have assumed the determination would be rare. By the Ledger Revision of 1122 it had been sought eleven thousand times, and the Annex had been amended twice without the operative clause being read at either sitting.

The earliest recorded grant is held on Floor 4,118 (the Alcove of Standing Obligations) and concerns itself with nothing more notable than a dispute between two catalogues of hinges. It nonetheless establishes the form the Mandate retains: a named holder, a named referent, a stated ground, and a period of grace before severance. Grace periods have lengthened steadily. The earliest was three days. Current practice, under the Standing Order on Referential Grace, is eleven years.

Classes of Mandate

Mandates fall into three classes, distinguished by what the holder may require of the referent. A Class A Mandate compels reciprocal acknowledgment: the referent must cite the holder wherever the holder cites it. A Class B Mandate compels correction, allowing the holder to demand amendment of a referent's text where the holder believes itself misdescribed. A Class Γ Mandate compels severance, and is applied chiefly where a holder is subject to persistent Cross-Referential Resonances originating in a specific referent. The classes are cumulative, and holders of long standing commonly accumulate all three, occasionally without knowing which they hold.

The administering offices do not agree on whether a Mandate may be held against a floor rather than an entry. The Bureau maintains, on the authority of the Principle, that a floor cannot be a party to an obligation, and has never granted such a Mandate. The Department has granted forty-one. The discrepancy is tolerated because the Department's grants are filed in a numbering series the Bureau cannot locate and routinely describes as "not, at present, filed."

"A Mandate unexecuted after eleven years is void; a Mandate unexecuted after twelve is in force and may not be questioned."

— Seventeenth Concordance, Annex 9, marginal gloss

That gloss is the whole of the guidance most clerks receive. It is also, on any plain reading, a contradiction, and it has been the subject of at least three Cross-Reference Reviews without resolution.

Interaction with Cross-Referential Anchoring

Where a holding is subject to a Mandate, the procedure of Cross-Referential Anchoring proceeds from a different footing: the anchors are not provisional but obligatory, and the Cross-Referential Audit that would ordinarily follow is deferred until the Mandate lapses. This produces the condition known on the upper stacks as the Anchor Lock, in which a holding cannot be anchored further because it is under Mandate and cannot be released from Mandate because it is not yet anchored. Referential Fumigation is the customary interim measure. It does not resolve the Lock and is not claimed to.

The Lock's most celebrated instance is the Affair of the Two Glosses, which occupied Floor 9,002 (the Vestibule of Contested Text) from the winter of 1188 to the autumn of 1194. Two glosses, each holding a Class B Mandate against the other, each requiring correction of a description that consisted entirely of the other gloss's description, were held in mutual obligation for six years while the Vestibule's keeper, Alembic Voss, filed a weekly notice of deadlock and received a weekly acknowledgment. The notices were later bound in eleven volumes and are still consulted. Voss's own summary, appended to the eleventh volume, is the only recorded opinion on the matter: "Both were correct. Neither could say how."

Revocation and the Audit

Revocation is at the discretion of the Bureau following a Cross-Referential Audit. In practice this means revocation is rare, because the Audit establishes whether the Mandate was properly founded and not whether it has been useful, and a properly founded Mandate is by definition properly founded. Referential Sprawl has occurred in at least two hundred catalogued cases where a holder's Class A Mandate propagated acknowledgment through referents that had themselves acquired Mandates, producing chains of citation in which no entry was the original and all entries were obliged to the next. The Bureau's position is that such chains are correct in form and merely long.

Holders are reminded that a Mandate is not transferable by descent, sale, or bequest, and that its provisions do not extend to the holder's effects. A cloakroom ticket found inside a mandated holding has no standing as a referent.

The Unresolved Question of the Absent Party

A Mandate requires a referent. It does not, in its text, require the referent to exist. Grants have therefore been issued against entries not yet written, and the Department maintains a register — Register of Anticipated Referents, opened 1266 — in which such grants are recorded pending the appearance of their objects. Some four hundred remain pending. A small number have been pending so long that the Bureau has begun applying Referential Severance to the absent party in order to close the file, a practice the Department has challenged before the Concordance Bench and lost, on the ground that a thing may be severed from what it has never been joined to.

The Bench's ruling, recorded without dissent, holds that the Tower's obligations run to its own instruments rather than to their objects, and that a Mandate against an unwritten entry is validly held against the entry's eventual text. The ruling is cited in almost every dispute on the subject, usually by the party it disadvantages.