Fragment 117-Ω-α

Fragment 117-Ω-α is a single leaf of prepared skin, measuring 148 by 203 millimetres and bearing three verses of the recension conventionally designated 117. It is a fragment of a fragment: its parent document is known only through the four quotations preserved in the dispute literature, and no portion of 117 survives otherwise. The leaf is held in the North Reading Room of the Office of the Archivist-Provisional, in a locked case whose key is kept in the same room, in a drawer, unlabelled. Requests to examine it are granted by form; requests to explain the form are answered by a second form.

Description and hand

The script is an early form of Spiral Notation, cramped and left-leaning, with the pen lifted between each verse. The scribe has numbered the verses in the left margin — 13, 14, and 15 — and it is on the strength of this marginal hand alone that the leaf is indexed as part of the 117 recension rather than an independent composition. The lower third of the leaf is lost to a clean diagonal tear, which Guild examiners in 894 attributed to a blade rather than to rot. Nothing is written on the reverse except a single aperture-mark, Ω, applied in a different ink and possibly by a different hand. The suffix α was added by the cataloguer, not the scribe.

The three verses are legible. Verses 13 and 15 are unremarkable. Verse 14 has been read every way it can be read and at least two ways it cannot.

Verse 14 and the reading dispute

Verse 14 occupies two lines and hinges on a single word with a suppressed vowel, which may be read as sealed, unsealed, or — on the reading advanced by Archivist-Provisional Nedda Corr in 901 — counted, on the ground that the suppression is not a vowel suppression at all but a tally-mark that has bled. The three readings correspond to the three positions in the wider dispute over the Miletus Fragment: that a Great Unsealing occurred during the Aris period, that it did not, and that it occurred but was not recorded, which Corr's opponents describe as the only reading that requires no evidence.

"Verse 14 cannot be cited in support of the Miletus Fragment, because verse 14 cannot be read without first deciding what the Miletus Fragment says. A document that requires the conclusion it is offered to prove is not evidence; it is a colleague."

— Finding 19, dissent of Librarian Osson, appended without number

The Office has not resolved the reading and has instead resolved the matter of citation: Fragment 117-Ω-α may be cited in proceedings, but only for the fact of its own existence. This has proved more useful than it sounds. The leaf was entered on the record during the Miletus Fragment Paradox and, according to the account later given by Eloise of the Unspooled Chain, was the only exhibit in the room that no one was able to dispute, precisely because no one was able to use it.

Provenance

The provenance chain runs to eleven entries, the fourth of which is a gap of forty-one years described in the register only as "the usual interval." The chain passes through Clockmaker's Landing, where the leaf was presented for preliminary examination alongside the Miletus Fragment itself; the examiners' note records that both objects were laid on the same bench and neither was altered, which is the most that can be said of the occasion. Whether the two were ever in the same collection remains unsettled, and the leaf's chain, measured in the usual way, extends to some 310 Kael Units against the Miletus Fragment's better-attested 1,200.

In 878 the leaf was admitted to the general holdings without the customary waiting period, a decision widely held to have contributed to the Crisis of the Unmoored Precedent. The admitting clerk, Marn of the Lower Stacks, defended himself in writing at length and in the end successfully, though the defence is filed under a heading no one consults.

Relationship to Annex Theta

The ordering of the Fragment 12 recension passes through Annex Theta, and the 117 recension has historically been collated alongside it. This has produced the position, still maintained by the Omega-7 collators, that Fragment 117-Ω-α should be filed not with its own recension but as a witness to Fragment 12 — a position that would require the leaf to move two floors down and, as the Office has noted drily, would require the Omega-7 collators to stop citing it.

The disagreement is procedural rather than textual, and it is old. The Concordance of Floors places fragments of uncertain parentage with their nearest legible neighbour (Concordance 44, clause 9); the Third Concordance places them with their nearest dated neighbour (Concordance 3, Annex 12). Fragment 117-Ω-α has no date. It therefore falls under both, and has been claimed by both, and has not moved.

Current status

The leaf remains in its case in the North Reading Room, collated with 117 by the Office and with 12 by the Omega-7 collators, cited only for its own existence, and read differently by everyone who reads it. The drawer containing the key sticks in damp weather. Visitors are asked not to lean on the case.

See also

• Fragment 889 of the Dusk Canon
• Procedural Leakage
• Breath-Score Fragments
• Procedural Stubs