Fifth Spiral Consolidation

The Fifth Spiral Consolidation was a period of architectural consolidation within the Fifth Spiral, during which the Tower's upper-middle stacks were reorganized, renumbered, and in several places structurally joined to one another, without the removal of any floor. It is dated by the Office of Reckonings to Years 1 through 19 of the Fifth Spiral, though the Reckonings themselves concede a margin of "not fewer than four years, not more than eleven." The Consolidation is best known for three administrative consequences: the creation of the Fifth Spiral Annex, the integration of the Fifth Spiral Watercourse into the catalogue proper, and the establishment of the office of Annex Provost — all of which outlasted the period that produced them.

The Consolidation was overseen by the Fifth Librarian, who simultaneously held the office of Chief Archivist and served as Chief Librarian. That three offices converged in a single person during the Consolidation is treated by most commentators not as an irregularity but as a necessary economy: the period's principal difficulty was that the floors being joined could not agree on whose jurisdiction they were in.

Origin and mandate

The Consolidation was authorized by the Fourth Concordance, Clause 12, which instructed that "floors found adjacent shall be made adjacent in fact." The instruction is the whole of the mandate; Clause 12 runs to a single sentence, and no schedule of floors accompanies it. The Fifth Librarian interpreted the clause broadly, and by Year 4 had convened the Custodians of the Fifth Spiral to survey and rank the affected stacks according to adjacency, use, and the willingness of their resident clerks to be joined.

The Spiral Concordance was ratified in Year 7 of the Fifth Spiral, and most of the Consolidation's procedural machinery — the survey schedules, the joining registers, the rules for what a floor may retain of its old number — derives from it rather than from the original mandate. This is the root of the period's most enduring confusion: the Consolidation is usually described as a work of the Fourth Concordance, but was in practice conducted almost entirely under the Spiral.

Architectural works

The Consolidation is remembered chiefly for two categories of construction. The first is the non-Euclidean junctions: passageways introduced at forty-one points where two floors were to be joined, in which the corridor's length does not correspond to the distance between its doors. The junctions were not, at the time, considered remarkable — they were an expedient for joining floors whose elevations did not match — and their later reputation as disorienting is a development of the Era of Recounting.

The second category is the static artifacts: objects fixed in place during the Consolidation so that they might be catalogued in a single position thereafter. The Fifth Librarian ordered the fixing of some eleven hundred such artifacts, including ladders, reading stands, and a complete and undisturbed set of the Marginal Registers that had until then been migrating between floors on their own initiative. That the artifacts no longer move has been confirmed at every survey since Year 19.

The Watercourse

The principal hydraulic work of the Consolidation was the integration of the Fifth Spiral Watercourse — both the cataloguing system and the physical channel that carries it — into the general catalogue of the Fifth Spiral. Before Year 9 the Watercourse was administered separately, under Tertiary Waterwork Ordinances that survive in fragmentary form. The Consolidation brought it under the Chief Archivist's jurisdiction and, in the process, established the principle that a cataloguing system may be catalogued in its own right.

Later commentary treats the Watercourse's integration as the model for all subsequent incorporations, including the Lys-Gamma Spiral, which was excavated during the Consolidation Period (Epoch 12–14) by crews trained on the Fifth Spiral's works. The Office of the Annex Provost, created during the Consolidation to administer the new Fifth Spiral Annex, remains the body responsible for both.

Disagreement among the Concordances

The Fifth and Seventh Concordances disagree as to what the Consolidation actually accomplished. The Fifth Concordance, Clause 3, holds that no floor was created or destroyed during the period — that the Consolidation "moved walls and left rooms." The Seventh Concordance, Clause 21, states that "floors were added," and appends a schedule of eleven which, on inspection, are the same eleven floors the Fifth describes as having been merely rejoined.

The Bureau of Concordance Reconciliation has declined to resolve the matter, ruling in Year 46 that both clauses are correct "in their respective senses of the word floor." Which senses those are is not stated in the ruling, and the Bureau has twice declined to state them when asked. The dispute matters administratively: if the Seventh is correct, the eleven floors owe back-levies to the Annex dating from Year 12, a sum the Treasury of the Spiral Annexes has assessed but never collected.

Legacy

The Consolidation gave the Fifth Spiral its present outline and its principal institutions: the Annex, the Provost's office, the Watercourse, and the Custodians of the Fifth Spiral, which remain headquartered at the Annex. It also gave the Tower its standard vocabulary for structural change — a floor "consolidated" is one whose number has been confirmed and whose walls have not, a distinction the Office of Reckonings now applies retroactively to six earlier periods.

The Fifth Librarian continues to maintain offices within the Annex and to sign the annual confirmation of the joining registers, a duty transferred to that office in Year 22 and performed without interruption since. No new junctions have been authorized since Year 19. The Consolidation is considered, in the Tower's cautious idiom, complete.