Department of Specular Integrity

The Department of Specular Integrity is a sub-order of the Librarians charged with the custody and continual revision of the Specular Records, and with the administration of Floor 719, where those Records are kept. It is among the smaller sub-orders by attested membership and among the most frequently cited in disputes, owing to the unusual evidentiary weight carried by its findings: a determination of the Department is treated, under Concordance 88 and its recensions, as a statement of fact rather than an opinion of an office.

The Department occupies no corridor of its own. Its officers work from the Specular Rooms on Floor 719 and from a satellite reading room on Floor 88, and are identified in the Records by the mark of a single ruled mirror, struck in green wax rather than the Librarians' customary black.

Mandate and sphere

The Department's writ is limited to surfaces that return an image: mirrors, polished stone, standing water held in basins of recorded dimension, and the optical interfaces of instruments admitted to the Register of Primary Apertures. It has no authority over surfaces that merely reflect light without forming an image, which fall to the Department of Structural Integrity where they are structural, and to the Department of Metrical Integrity where they are merely dimensioned. This boundary is older than either of the offices that share it and has been redrawn six times, most recently in the winter of the year the Department's ledger records as 4,112 by its own count — the Department dates its documents from the founding of the Specular Rooms rather than from any Concordance, a practice the Librarians have three times declined to regularise.

Between 4,011 and 4,019 the Department maintained a small annex for the examination of reflective surfaces that had ceased to return any image at all, keeping them under glass and observing them at intervals. The annex was closed and its holdings dispersed after the Second Recension of the Specular Records found that the surfaces continued to do nothing, and that the record of their doing nothing had grown to eleven volumes.

Procedure and the counting rule

Every surface entering the Records is examined by two officers working in separate rooms, each of whom records the number of distinct images the surface returns when a single lamp is presented to it at a stated distance. Where the two counts agree, the count is entered without further remark. Where they do not, the surface is examined a third time and the count taken is the lower of the three, on the reasoning set out in the Department's standing instructions: "A surface that appears to show more than it shows is in the first stage of showing something else, and the archive is not the place for that" (Standing Instructions of the Specular Rooms, clause 14).

This rule — known within the Department simply as the counting rule — has been applied without exception since 3,988, when a basin of still water on Floor 402 was entered at three images and thereafter found to hold two, the third having been an officer. The officer was not named in the amendment and is not named here.

Dispute with the Department of Vertical Integrity

The Department's longest-running dispute concerns the mirrors mounted in stairwells and shaft-heads, of which the Tower contains an uncounted number. The Department of Specular Integrity holds that a mirror in a stairwell is a mirror and belongs in the Records regardless of its position. The Department of Vertical Integrity holds that such a mirror belongs to the shaft it serves, is a component of that shaft, and is therefore a vertical matter.

"A surface placed at a turn of the stair is answerable to the stair. The image it returns is incidental to the turning."

— Department of Vertical Integrity, Memorandum of 3,876, Annex B

The Department of Specular Integrity replied in a memorandum of its own, which is unusual, as it does not generally reply. It observed that the shaft's own officers had on four occasions requested the Department's examination of stairwell mirrors in order to settle questions of their curvature, and that an office cannot hold a thing to be incidental and also require it to be measured. The Department of Stack Integrity was invited to arbitrate in 3,904 and declined, noting that the matter was not one of stacking. The dispute remains open; both offices continue to enter the same mirrors, and the Specular Records carry a standing note that entries marked with a vertical seal are duplicated elsewhere and should be counted once.

Relation to the Bureau and to the wider order

The Department is not a bureau and resents the assumption. The Bureau of Referential Integrity is a separate body with its own seal, and the two are distinguished in Tower usage by the fact that the Bureau is concerned with what a thing is called and the Department with what a thing shows. Officers of the Bureau have on at least two occasions been received in the Specular Rooms and asked to leave.

The Department's findings are relied upon by the Department of Designational Integrity when a name is disputed on the ground that it no longer matches its object, and by the Department of Taxonomical Integrity when a surface must be placed in a class. It has no formal relationship with the Harmonic Integrity Commission, though the Commission's charter under the Department of Structural Integrity is sometimes read as reaching reflective surfaces on the ground that they ring. The Department's position on this is that mirrors do not ring, and that the Commission has never asked it.

Criticism and the doctrine of full showing

A minority reading, advanced most fully in the Kalder Memorandum of 4,061, argues that the counting rule has made the Specular Records systematically under-report and that the Department's true function — a comprehensive, non-redundant catalogue of every reflective surface in the Tower — has been quietly narrowed by a procedure designed to prevent a single embarrassing entry. Kalder notes that in 4,058 the Records admitted no surface returning more than one image, a figure he describes as "not a finding but a policy."

The Department has answered this once, in the Fourth Recension of the Specular Records, preface, paragraph 3, and has not answered it since:

"The Records are complete. A surface that shows two things shows them because it has been asked twice, and the Department asks once."

— Fourth Recension of the Specular Records, Preface, paragraph 3

The counting rule was reaffirmed by the Department of Procedural Integrity in 4,077 as an item of settled procedure and not a matter of Narrative Inertia. Floor 719 remains open to readers on the first and third days of the week, between the hours the lamps are lit.