Department of Temporal Cartography

The Department of Temporal Cartography is an executive arm of the Department of Cartography charged with the survey, registration, and correction of spatial regions whose location is stable but whose position in time is not. It should not be confused with the Subbureau of Temporal Reconciliation, which governs the practice of Temporal Cartography as a discipline, nor with the Bureau of Latent Cartography, which retains concurrent jurisdiction over any temporal survey whose results have not yet been observed. The Department draws the maps; the Subbureau decides what a map is allowed to say.

Its seat is Floor 714, a suite of eleven rooms and one stairwell that the Department's own surveyors record as occupying four different decades simultaneously. Staff are issued two clocks and instructed to trust neither.

Mandate and jurisdiction

The Department was constituted by Concordance 22-B, which assigns it authority over "ground that holds still while the hour beneath it does not." In practice this covers three classes of survey:

• Fixed-drift surveys — terrain that remains in one place but advances or retreats through time at a constant rate, typically between four minutes and nine days per circuit.
• Slack regions — areas in which the local hour is uncertain by more than one hour, generally owing to the proximity of an unclosed stairwell.
• Contested dates — ground on which two or more Concordances assign different dates to the same feature.

The third class accounts for the majority of the Department's workload and effectively all of its correspondence. Under the Manual of Temporal Cartography, every contested date must be resolved by Temporal Designation before a survey may be filed. The Manual specifies the procedure at §4.11 but does not specify what to do when the Designation itself is contested, a gap the Department has petitioned to have closed on nine occasions and been refused on eight.

Method

Departmental surveyors work in pairs, one recording position and one recording hour, and are forbidden to converse during a survey except to say the word now, which is logged with a timestamp. A completed survey yields a strip map: a conventional floor plan printed across a band of dates, so that a corridor twelve metres long may occupy sixty-one metres of paper. The strips are stored flat in the Departmental Vault on Floor 715, which is kept at a constant humidity of 44 per cent and a constant hour of 11:20, an arrangement the Department of Anomalous Durations has twice cited as exemplary and once as irregular.

Where a survey cannot be closed — that is, where the terrain's temporal drift exceeds the surveyor's remaining shift — the strip is filed as open and transferred to the Bureau of Contradictory Cartography. Roughly one strip in nine ends this way.

The Allegiance Question

The Department is the subject of a longstanding dispute over which body it ultimately answers to. Concordance 22-B §7 places it under the "direction and correction" of the Department of Cartography without qualification. Concordance 31-F, ratified eleven years later but never formally repealing 22-B, assigns all temporal surveying to the Department of Temporal Reconciliation and describes the cartographic role as "purely decorative."

The Department's own position, stated in a circular of 14 March (year disputed), is that 31-F governs the reconciliation of temporal anomalies while 22-B governs their depiction, and that the two functions are distinct. The Department of Cartography has declined to arbitrate, noting that it jointly oversees Ephemeral Cartography with the Department of Correlative Cartography and considers the present matter beneath its notice. The Department of Temporal Reconciliation has not commented in writing since the circular was issued.

"A map of a thing that will not hold still is still a map. It is only a worse one."

— Departmental standing instruction, posted at the Floor 714 stairwell

Relations with adjacent bureaus

Survey work overlaps unavoidably with several neighbouring offices. The Department seconds two cartographers permanently to the Bureau of Concordant Cartography to ensure that completed strips are harmonised with standing Concordance before filing. It coordinates with the Department of Vertical Cartography on stairwells, which present both vertical and temporal complications and which neither department has been willing to claim outright since the Stairwell 88 incident. It maintains a standing liaison with the Department of Noetic Cartography regarding terrain that is remembered differently by different surveyors, though that bureau's status has been unsettled for some years.

The Department has no formal relationship with the Department of Acoustic Cartography, but its surveyors are trained to note the acoustic signature of any slack region, on the reasoning that a corridor which sounds like Tuesday is likely to be Tuesday.

Criticism

The Department's methods have been criticised by the plasticity school, which holds that a temporal survey alters the terrain it records and that the Department's strips are therefore not maps but interventions. The Department accepts the premise and rejects the conclusion, arguing that a survey which alters its subject is still a survey, merely an expensive one. Its own internal review of the last three hundred strips found that 41 per cent had shifted measurably following survey, a figure the Department publishes annually without further remark.

A separate and more practical complaint concerns staffing. Of the Department's twenty-two authorised surveyors, eleven are listed as at post, six as at post, date unconfirmed, and five as elsewhere. The Department has requested clarification of the fifth category from the Librarians in every annual return since the category was created. No clarification has been issued, and the Department continues to complete its returns.