Integration Committee

The Integration Committee is the ad-hoc body constituted to authorize Integration with Annexes and to certify the resulting record as concordant. It has no standing membership, no fixed chambers, and no seal of its own; it is convened by writ, sits for the duration of a single act of integration, and dissolves upon the affixing of the certifying mark. Its authority derives from the Directorate of Concordant Integration, which retains oversight of all committees so convened, though the Committee's determinations are not in practice reviewable except by the Directorate sitting in full.

Because the Committee is drawn fresh each time, its composition varies with the species of integration at hand. For Doctrinal Integration it is typically drawn from the Curatorial Guild and the Office of Temporal Reconciliation, the latter supplying the temporal attestation without which no doctrinal annex may be sealed. This convention is old but not absolute, and the Manual of Vertical Integration records at least one instance, on Floor 412, in which a doctrinal annex was sealed by a committee containing neither body and survived challenge for eleven years before being quietly re-executed.

Composition and drawing

Drawing is performed by the Bureau of Cyclical Integration under the standing supervision of its Chief Integrator, Archivist-Emeritus Kael, who also sits on the Directorate's standing committee for Doctrinal Integration. In theory the Bureau draws from a register of available bodies; in practice the register is maintained by the Bureau itself, and the phrase "available" has never been defined to the satisfaction of the Committee for Non-Intersecting Jurisdictions. That Committee has twice requested a definition and twice been advised to seek one elsewhere.

A committee is normally five in number. Three suffice where the annex is purely descriptive. A committee of one is permitted for Annexes of the Fourth Order, provided the integrator signs twice in different inks — a rule introduced after the Second Concordance on Sealing and never rescinded.

The Kelloway objection

The most sustained dispute in the Committee's recorded history concerns precedence between its two most frequent drawing bodies. The Office of Temporal Reconciliation holds that its attestation is constitutive of the act, since an integration without temporal attestation has no date and an undated annex is a draft. The Curatorial Guild holds that curation is constitutive, since an integration without custody of the objects concerned is a claim about nothing. Neither position has been formally defeated.

"Where the Committee is drawn from both bodies, the later-sealed signature shall govern; where the later-sealed signature is in dispute, the Committee shall be reconstituted and the question put again."

— Third Concordance, Annex 7, clause 4

"Reconstitution does not resolve precedence. It postpones it, at cost."

— Assessor Kelloway, minute of dissent appended to the Committee's finding of Winter 6, Floor 903

Kelloway's objection has been appended to some four hundred subsequent findings without once being answered. It is now customary for the dissent to be copied forward by the recording clerk without being read, and at least one Committee has appended it to an integration from which the Guild had been entirely absent.

Procedure in session

The Committee meets where the annex lies, not where the members would prefer. It opens by reading the annex aloud in full, a requirement inherited from the Manual of Contextual Integration (CCI-α) and retained notwithstanding that many annexes exceed nine hundred folios. Reading may be delegated to a single member, provided the others remain within hearing. The Committee for Ephemeral Cohesion has ruled that "within hearing" does not require comprehension; the ruling has been appealed and stands.

Voting is by acclamation where unanimous, and by sealed tally where not. A tie is resolved by the visiting rule: the member seated nearest the aperture votes last and votes twice. Where the chamber has no aperture, the rule lapses and the annex is returned to the Bureau unintegrated — a circumstance the Bureau's own returns ledger lists forty-one times since the ledger's establishment, and which has never once been attributed to a missing aperture.

Upon certification the Committee ceases to exist. Its papers pass to the Curatorial Guild; its members pass to whatever they were doing before. The Bureau maintains that a dissolved Committee cannot be cited, and the Directorate maintains that it can. The Horizontal Integration Y54115430 is the standing test of the question, the Directorate having upheld its dual designation in three rulings, each of which cites a Committee that no longer exists.

Recorded difficulties

In the winter of Floor 903 the Committee was convened, read its annex, voted, and certified — and was then convened again the following morning on the same annex, no member having been discharged. Both certificates bear the same date and the same seals. The Manual of Vertical Integration treats the episode as an instance of double constitution and declines to say which certificate governs; the Procedures for Latent Integration take the view that the second Committee was a continuation and the first never dissolved, which would make the first certificate void for want of a committee.

The Committee of Necessary Splits has since held, in an opinion circulated but not adopted, that the question is properly one for its own jurisdiction. The Sub-Committee for Dormancy Integrity has asked to be informed of the outcome. It has not been informed.

Status

The Committee remains in regular use, principally in the sealing of doctrinal and archival annexes, and its certificates are accepted throughout the Tower as concordant on their face. The Directorate has not revised the drawing register since the seventh amendment of the Manual of Vertical Integration, and there is no indication that it intends to. Assessor Kelloway's dissent continues to be appended.