Initiation

Initiation is, in the administrative usage of The Tower, the formal act by which a subject, procedure, document, or cycle is recognised as having begun. It is distinguished from commencement, which is merely the point at which a thing is observed to have started, and from induction, which is the attempt to begin something that does not subsequently begin. The Tower holds that nothing may be catalogued until it has been initiated, and that nothing may be initiated until it has already been initiated — a formulation the Central Registry has defended without interruption since the Seventh Concordance entered recension.

The pre-existence rule

The governing principle is set out at Clause 7 of the Seventh Concordance, which states that permits for initiation pre-exist the initiation they permit. The Registry's gloss on this clause, issued from the Chamber of Initiation in the ninth year of the present recension, is that the permit is not a permission to begin but evidence that beginning has already occurred elsewhere and is only now being recorded. The practical consequence is that Manifest Initiation is always a second event. The first is not documented, and the Registry has declined, on four separate petitions, to say why.

A petition for a First Inquest was once carried into the Chamber of Initiation and set down before the presiding Senior. It was returned unopened with a note reading, in full: "The petition is correct and should not have been brought." The note is preserved under glass in the Chamber's eastern annex. Visitors are asked not to read it aloud.

Initiation of procedures

Every procedural initiation in the Tower has its own instrument. The Declarative Trigger permits the initiation of Declarative Submission, and no other instrument does. The formal initiation of a Scholastic Inquest falls to Clause 7 and may not be delegated to a subordinate clause even where the subordinate clause is more convenient. Vigilant Curing is initiated only by the Office of the Lord Vigilant, which has twice initiated it in error and once on a floor where no curing was possible, there being no substance present to cure.

Terminal Cataloguing cannot begin without the submission of a Terminal Slip, and the Slip cannot be obtained after the cataloguing has started. Clerks resolve this by carrying a supply of blank Slips at all times, completed in pencil, on the reasoning that a Slip submitted before it is needed is indistinguishable from one submitted when it is.

The Kappa Cycle is initiated exclusively on Transfer Floor 19-Kappa, and exclusively by the junior clerk present, irrespective of seniority present. This rule was affirmed in the aftermath of the Kappa Omission, in which a full bench of Seniors stood on the correct floor for six hours and no cycle occurred.

The Alban dispute

Senior Lumener Alban documented the initiation of the Waning of the West Stack in a memorandum of some length, and the memorandum is the only surviving record of the event. The Office of the Lord Vigilant disputes the document on the ground that Alban records the Waning as initiated before the memorandum describing it, which the Office holds to be circular. The Registry holds that the circularity is not a defect but the definition. The dispute has been open since the Waning and is now itself a catalogue holding, which some take as proof of the Registry's position and others as evidence that the Tower will catalogue anything rather than settle it.

"An initiation that cannot be documented has not occurred. An initiation that can be documented has occurred twice, and the second occurrence is the record. The Tower catalogues the record."

— Third Concordance, Annex 11, marginal gloss

Material requirements

Initiation is performed on the floor where the subject will be held, not the floor where the petition was filed, and a subject initiated on the wrong floor must be carried up or down to the correct one before it may be said to have begun. Carrying is not initiation. A recent amendment to the Documentation of Negation requires the carrier's name to be entered on the reverse of the form, a provision that has caused considerable difficulty in the case of subjects too large to carry, which are now initiated in place by a clerk who walks around them once and signs at the conclusion of the circuit.

The sounding of the initiation bell is not required, but its omission must be noted. The bell on Transfer Floor 19-Kappa has not sounded correctly since the winter of the third recension and is struck by hand; the striker is drawn from the junior clerks, and the post is considered unlucky.

Related instruments

Initiation is frequently confused with Spontaneous Reclassification, which requires no instrument at all, and with the operation of Cessation Triggers, which are the opposite. A successful Ontological Review mandates a Substantive Review, and the initiation of the second is a fixed consequence of the first — the only automatic initiation the Tower recognises. All others are discretionary, including the one that is not.

The full sequence of a properly initiated holding, from the trigger to the deposit, is set out in The Transcription Cycle, which has eleven stages and a twelfth that is not counted. The custodial record of each initiation is kept under the Custodial Chain and may be requested by any Librarian, provided the request is itself initiated.