Final Aperture

The Final Aperture is the designation applied, in the administrative literature of the Tower, to whichever aperture is at that moment understood to be the last of a given cycle. It is not a fixed location. No floor number attaches to it, no seal distinguishes it permanently, and the Central Registry of Codified Law has twice declined to issue it a standing entry, on the grounds that an aperture which can be superseded cannot be catalogued as a place. The Final Aperture is therefore recorded here as a category, and readers are advised that any citation to it should be checked against the cycle in which it was made.

The term first appears in the marginalia of the Third Concordance, where it is used casually and without definition, a circumstance the Guild of Final Scribes has described in its Notices on Marginal Usage (Recension C, fol. 88) as "the single most expensive looseness of language in the Concordant record."

Relation to the Aperture Cycle

An aperture becomes final by the closure of its cycle rather than by any property of its own. When the Manual of Final Closures is invoked and the final inventory scroll is deposited in the Archives of the Fifth Cycle, the aperture last named in that scroll is thereafter styled the Final Aperture for the purposes of that cycle and no other. Certification is retrospective. It is common for an aperture to have been the Final Aperture for eleven days before anyone learns that it was.

This retrospection has produced a class of disputes the Registry calls "belated finals." In the winter of the forty-fourth cycle, an aperture on the eastern stair received a Certificate of Final Form on a Thursday, was superseded by a late-entered aperture on the following Monday, and retained its certificate because the wax had already been witnessed. The certificate was not withdrawn. It simply ceased to describe anything. The Registry's note on the matter reads, in full: "The seal stands. The appellation does not."

The Doctrine of the Proximate Final

Because finality is conferred by the scroll and not by the aperture's position, apertures near the expected end of a cycle often accumulate provisional honours in anticipation. The Aperture of Provisional Protocols is the best-known example, having been styled Final Aperture in draft on nine separate occasions without once carrying the designation in a ratified scroll. The practice is tolerated and is known as proximate finality. It is not a rank, though it is frequently treated as one by junior functionaries, and the resulting confusion is a standing item in the curriculum of the Functionaries of the Final Line.

A note on seals

Proximate finality confers no sealing rights. Only an aperture named in a deposited scroll may be sealed as final, and the sealing must be witnessed at the wax by a Proctor of the Registry. A seal applied early is void but must still be removed by the office that applied it, which has led to several apertures being sealed and unsealed more often than they have been visited.

Scholarly Disagreement

The principal dispute concerns whether the Final Aperture can be plural. The Scriptorium of Final Recourse holds, in its commentary on the Master Lines, that a cycle may terminate at more than one aperture simultaneously where the inventory scrolls are deposited in parallel, and that each such aperture is fully final within its own line. Against this, the Chamber of Onomastic Reconciliation ruled in In re: The Final Aperture (Nomenclature) that finality is a singular predicate and that a plural final is "a contradiction the archives are not obliged to indulge." The ruling has never been applied to an actual closure.

"Where two scrolls are deposited on the same day, the later hour governs, and where the hour is the same, the Registrar's hand governs, and where the hand is disputed, the matter is not an aperture question."

— Manual of Final Closures, Annex 7, clause 3

A minority position, associated with the survey notes gathered under Final Charting and never formally published, holds that the Final Aperture is not an aperture at all but a name the Tower keeps in reserve for one it has not yet built. The Final Report Sigma-9 does not list it in any sector. Proponents of the reserve reading note that the designation has never been found on an aperture outward-facing enough to be entered from a corridor, which they take as suggestive; the Registry takes it as no evidence whatsoever. No Concordance has settled the question, and the Sealed Apertures register records no candidate.

Practical Consequences

Because no single aperture holds the title, the phrase "the Final Aperture" is not a valid address. Correspondence directed to it is returned to the sender with the annotation that the addressee must be specified by cycle, and undeliverable letters have on three occasions been read aloud at the Office of Final Accord in the belief that they concerned a Precedence Edict. Visitors seeking the Final Aperture are directed to the Registry, then to the Scriptorium, then to the corridor they began in; the Tower's wayfinding does not accommodate a destination that moves.

It is also worth recording that the Crown of Final Alternatives bears a seventh facet inscribed with the phrase, cut so that it reads identically whichever way the crown is turned. The gem-cutters' accounts for the work are held in the Scriptorium and have been requested eleven times, always by the same office.

No Final Aperture is presently open. There is, at the time of writing, no cycle in progress on any floor the Registry is willing to name.