Entry into the Master Log

Entry into the Master Log is the formal act by which a record first becomes admissible within the Tower, distinct from the record's later amendment, recension, or removal. The Entry is not the record itself and is not a copy of it; it is the point at which the Master Log acknowledges that a record exists, and it is held to be effective from the moment of inscription, not from the moment of approval. Approximately 3.1 million Entries are active at any time, of which roughly a third have never been read by any party other than the clerk who made them.

Because Amendments operate on records already entered, and cannot operate on records still outside, the Entry is the oldest and least contested mechanism in the Tower's written life. Almost nothing else about it is agreed.

The three acts

Inscriptions are performed in sequence and, by the fourteenth recension of the Concordance of Inscriptions, at three separate floors of the Tower, though practitioners have disputed which three floors since at least the winter of 1,208. The acts are: the drafting of the record by a Scribe of the Lower Stacks; the checking of the draft against the register of prior entries by a Clerk Confirmer; and the impression of the acknowledgement seal, which no two offices agree on the custody of. Only the third act is treated as constituting the Entry. The first two are preparatory, and preparatory work may be abandoned, corrected, or quietly unsaid without consequence.

This produces the anomaly known informally as the open draft: a record may be drafted, checked, and left unsealed for decades, while every later reference to it treats it as though it had been entered. The Master Register of Volition contains eleven such drafts, one of which has been cited in support of a concordance amendment on forty-one occasions without ever having been entered. When the omission was discovered in 1,411, the Clerk Confirmer responsible, Clerk Anselm of the Fifth Gallery, argued that the entries had been made in spirit and that the actual seal was a formality. The objection was noted and not acted upon.

The question of retroactive entry

Whether an Entry may be backdated was settled, then unsettled, then settled again. The Spiral Concordance, Annex 7, holds that the Master Log acknowledges only what is written in it and cannot acknowledge what is not, and that a backdated Entry is therefore void on its face. Against this, Concordance 14, Article 3, provides that rectified omissions are to be entered "as of the day the omission began," which is precisely a backdating. The two have coexisted in the same body of governance for two hundred and thirty years.

"An Entry is a moment, not an interval, and a moment cannot have two dates."

— Spiral Concordance, Annex 7, clause 2

In practice the question is resolved by a workaround originating in the Filing Halls: the record receives a second, fresh Entry on the day of correction, and a marginal note — never called a backdating, and never ruled to be one — records the earlier omission. The marginal note lies outside the acknowledged text and carries no formal weight. It is, however, the version cited by later clerks in nine cases out of ten.

Entry and conditional reality

Entry does not make a subject real in the sense of a Catalog Entry; that distinction belongs to instantiation into the Master Index, which grants a subject conditional reality within the Tower's jurisdiction. The Entry into the Master Log acknowledges that something has been asked about, not that the thing asked about has been assembled. A record may be entered for a subject that has no Catalog Entry, and frequently is. Where the two are conflated, the usual error is to attempt to amend the Entry, which cannot be amended, instead of the record, which can.

This distinction is recorded plainly in the working notes of the Scriptorium, though it is not observed by all offices. The question of the Central Index (document) against the Master Log was put to Aperture Gammas in 1,398 and returned unanswered, a result the requesting clerk described in his docket as "the only answer we have ever received."

The protracted feud of the two Halls

The seal of acknowledgement is held, on alternate days, by the Hall of Inks and the Hall of Marginalia. The arrangement was intended to distribute the work and instead distributed the blame: whenever an Entry is found to be missing, each Hall asserts that it fell on the other's day, and neither can prove it, because the day-books of both Halls are kept in the same room and cannot be separated without breaking the seal on the room. The room has not been opened since 1,392.

The dispute escalated in the spring of 1,368, when both Halls sealed the same Entry on the same day and the acknowledgement was thereafter treated as doubled. The doubled seal required a clarifying amendment, which required an Entry, which required a seal. The matter was resolved by Consolidation into Collective Entries, which permits a disputed Entry to be absorbed into a single collective record whose own Entry is taken to have occurred at the earliest date of its constituents — a settlement nobody finds satisfactory and nobody has managed to overturn.

Maintenance and record

The Master Log's Entry register is presently bound in four volumes, the fourth partly blank on account of water damage on the eleventh gallery in the autumn of 1,404. Entries affected by that damage are marked with a single marginal stroke and are considered valid. Clerks are asked not to bring candles onto the eleventh gallery.

Entries are not destroyed, and the Master Log has no provision for their erasure. Where a record is removed, withdrawn, or found never to have existed, the Entry is allowed to stand, marked as dormant, and the subject is thereafter said to be "logged and gone." This has occasionally created difficulty for later clerks who cite the dormant Entry without checking the surrounding pages. The Log of Unanswered Questions, itself entered under the designation Log.88.IMP.Δ and perpetually amended, contains a well-known instruction on the point, less often followed than quoted: a record should be read from the Entry forward, not backward from the citation.

The bureaucracy is thorough. It is the thoroughness that keeps the pages turning.