Epochal Standing Committee

The Epochal Standing Committee is a rotating body of seven Librarians empowered to grant ratification for any Epochal proposed for use within the Tower. It is the only office whose seal converts a proposed time-reckoning from a private convenience into an instrument of record. The Committee does not devise Epochals, does not maintain them, and does not, by its own repeated insistence, understand them; it ratifies. Seven members sit at any time, no member serves more than one term of eleven years, and no member may be reappointed to the seat they vacated. The rotation is staggered so that no two members leave in the same year, a provision introduced after the Committee of Permanent Review noted in its annual observation for Year 174 that "a committee which changes entirely at once may be persuaded twice."

Origin and Mandate

The Committee was constituted under Second Concordance, Article 9, which established that "time within the Tower shall be reckoned by such Epochs as are ratified, and by no others." The phrasing has caused four centuries of difficulty, since Article 9 does not say who ratifies, only that ratification must occur. The Standing Committee for Precedential Adherence holds that the original ratifying authority was the Librarians assembled in full and that the seven-seat Committee is a delegated convenience; the Committee itself maintains, in its standing preamble, that it was "convened at the moment Article 9 was sealed and has been in continuous session since." No minutes exist from before Year 63, when the first surviving attendance roll was written on a scrap of ledger binding and filed, for reasons now obscure, in the cartography alcove of Floor 4,414.

The Committee's mandate has narrowed considerably since its early years. It once ratified weights, measures, and alphabets alongside calendars. The alphabets were surrendered to the Committee on Nominative Distinction in Year 202, and the weights were lost to the Standing Committee on Metric Stability in Year 291 following the Ruling 88-δ dispute, which the Epochal Committee lost on a procedural point concerning the order in which seals are affixed. The Committee has never fully forgiven this.

Procedure of Ratification

A petitioner submits an Epochal in triplicate to the Committee's registry on Floor 2,203, accompanied by a specimen calendar covering no fewer than four hundred years and a statement of the Epochal's proposed origin. The Committee then sits in closed session. It hears no testimony, calls no witnesses, and permits no petitioner to remain in the chamber. Ratification requires five votes; a petition failing at four is returned "unratified but not refused," a distinction the Committee has never explained and the Committee for Unintended Synthesis has twice requested it define.

The consequences of a failed petition are severe and occasionally disproportionate. The Epochal of the Long Quiet, proposed in Year 388, was returned at four votes and its author, the Librarian Sennet Vole, was thereafter required to date all personal correspondence by the ratified Epochal of the day rather than his own. Vole complied for thirty-one years. His letters are held in the Annex C collection and are considered a valuable record precisely because of the laborious double-dating in the margins.

"The Committee does not judge whether an Epochal is true. It judges whether the Tower may be asked to live inside it. These are different questions and only one of them is ours."

— Presiding Librarian Ovell Marsh, opening address, Year 512

Rotation and the Empty Seat

The staggered rotation has produced its own jurisprudence. When a member dies or is removed before term, the seat remains empty until the next scheduled rotation rather than being filled at once. This rule, recorded in the Committee's Third Book of Seating, is defended on the grounds that "an interrupted term is not a term," and has twice left the Committee with six members during a contested ratification. In Year 604 the six-member Committee ratified the Epochal of the Divided Year by a vote of five to one, and the Committee for Latent Jurisprudence has argued ever since that a six-member ratification cannot bind seven-seat sessions. The Epochal remains in use on Floor 8,818, whose name was entered in the Unclaimed Storeys register as 'Eight Thousand Eight Hundred and Eighteen' in the same year, and where the divided calendar is still printed each winter by the stairwell wardens, who are not consulted on the matter and print it anyway.

Members are chosen by lot from the Librarians on the Tier Gamma roll who have served no fewer than nine years and have never presided over a ratification they petitioned for. The lot is drawn publicly, in the Hall of Falling Seals, from a cedar box containing one slip per eligible Librarian. Two slips are drawn each rotation and one is returned unread to the box, a precaution against what the Third Book of Seating calls "the appearance of selection." The returned slip is burned without being opened. On one occasion in Year 559 the box was found to contain an additional slip in a hand no one recognized; the Committee recorded the incident in a single line and has declined to discuss it since.

Criticism and the Unratified Years

The Committee's most persistent critic has been the Committee for Linear Time, which maintains that ratification should be automatic upon submission and that the Committee's discretionary power is "a veto over the calendar disguised as a courtesy." The Linearists point to the Unratified Years, a span of forty-two years in the sixth century during which no Epochal was in force and Tower records were dated by floor number and the position of the sun in the western apertures. The Committee's answer, offered in Year 561 and never revised, is that the Unratified Years were "a period of deliberate openness" and that the records of the period are more legible than those immediately preceding it. The Sub-committee on Lexical Integrity has asked the Committee to withdraw the word "deliberate," and the Committee has not.

Relations with the Standing Committee on Narrative Stability are cooler still. The Narrative Committee objected in Year 588 that ratified Epochals exert a stabilizing pull on accounts of the past, and that the Epochal Standing Committee therefore exercises narrative authority without the Narrative Inertia Management oversight that the Stability Committee considers its own. The Epochal Committee replied that it ratifies clocks, not stories, and that if stories choose to arrange themselves around clocks this is not its affair. The two bodies have not corresponded since, though they share a stairwell on Floor 1,706 and their clerks exchange greetings.

Records and Seals

Every ratification is entered in the Roll of Ratified Epochs, kept in a locked cabinet on Floor 2,203 and transcribed afresh every sixty years by two scribes working in sight of one another. The Roll presently runs to fourteen volumes; the seventh is missing and is presumed to have been carried upward during the Expedition of the Ninth Stair. Petitioners wishing to consult the Roll must apply in writing, state their floor of residence, and surrender their writing implements at the door. The clerk on duty returns them upon departure, except on the fourth day of the week, when the registry closes early for cleaning and implements are held overnight. The Committee has never explained the reason for this arrangement and the Committee of Permanent Review has three times declined to ask.

The Committee's seal is a plain ring of twelve notches, one for each month of the ratified Epochal in use at the time of its casting. As the ratified Epochal changes, the seal is recast; eleven seals survive in the Crypt of Retired Instruments, and the twelfth is in use. It is not permitted to photograph the seal. It is permitted to draw it, provided the drawing is destroyed before the drawer leaves the building.