Keeper Valerian

Keeper Valerian is the current holder of three offices simultaneously: Keeper of Unspoken Components, head of the Office of the Keeper of Unspoken Components; Keeper of Paradoxes, an honorific conferred by the Keeper of the Spiral; and — according to the register of the Office of the Keeper of Precedents, which has never been amended to say otherwise — a recognized postholder of the title Keeper of Paradoxes under the older, narrower instrument of Year 874.AA. That these are not the same title is the subject of considerable literature and one unresolved dispute.

Valerian is unusual among senior Keepers in holding a paradox title without having passed through a scriptorium. Keeper Linus, who held the office before his elevation to Keeper of the Spiral, spent forty-one years in the Spiral 299 annex before receiving it; Keeper Theodosia, the present First Keeper, has cited this precedent in correspondence as recently as Year 1204. Valerian's elevation was instead made on the strength of a single custodial act, described below.

The intake of the unspoken

The Office of the Keeper of Unspoken Components collects components that were spoken aloud once and then withdrawn. Its intake procedure is nominally overseen by a sub-curator reporting to the Keeper, though Valerian has not appointed one since Year 1198, and the post is presently discharged by rota from the Office of Provisional Holdings. Intake occurs on Floor 44, at the second door, which does not open on the first attempt.

The act for which Valerian is chiefly known took place in the winter of Year 1196.AA, when a component offered for deposit was found to have been spoken twice — once by its depositor and once, in error, by the intake clerk, Clerk Merris Dunne, who was reading the label aloud to himself. A doubly spoken component cannot be vaulted under Concordance 412, which admits only components "uttered once and thereafter silent" (Concordance 412, clause 6). Valerian ruled that the clerk's utterance did not count, on the ground that a label is not a component, and admitted the deposit. The ruling has been followed ever since and is cited in the office's standing instruction, though the instruction is not numbered and cannot be found by anyone who has not already read it.

Clerk Dunne was reassigned within the year. His petition for reinstatement, submitted in Year 1199 and again in 1201, remains in the annex.

The double title dispute

The Office of the Keeper of Precedents maintains the single-Keeper reading of the 1597 instruments attributed to Keeper Armitage, under which only one person may hold the paradox titles at a time and only by direct grant of the Spiral. Keeper of the Spiral has declined to comment on the reading in writing, which the Precedents Office treats as assent and the Spiral treats as silence.

"The instrument admits of one Keeper and one Keeper only; a second holding is a holding of nothing, and nothing may be vaulted in a holding of nothing."

— Office of the Keeper of Precedents, Memorandum of Year 902.AA, annex 2

Against this, the Spiral's own recension of the grant describes the title as honorific and non-exclusive — a distinction first drawn, awkwardly, by Keeper Linus during his long disagreement with Keeper Armitage over the Resonator's tuning standard, when Linus needed to hold two titles at once and required a rationale. The rationale has outlived the dispute that produced it. Valerian has not defended it and has not renounced either title.

The Office of the Keeper of Temporary Jurisdictions has offered an opinion, at the request of no one. Keeper Aurin Vess, acting, wrote in Year 1202 that the question is jurisdictional and therefore not theirs, and forwarded the file to the Precedents Office, which forwarded it back. The file is now held by both offices and by neither.

Relationship with the Silent Wing

Keeper Alaric was reassigned to the Silent Wing in Year 901.AA, having succeeded Valerian's predecessor, and the two offices have exchanged no formal correspondence since. The omission is deliberate on the Unspoken Components side: a component deposited in the Silent Wing is, by the Wing's founding instrument, not spoken of, and the Office of Unspoken Components holds that acknowledging the Wing in its own registers would constitute a speaking. The Wing, asked to confirm this in Year 1188, confirmed it in writing, which the office considers a breach and has declined to answer.

Practically, this means that a component transferred from Floor 44 to the Silent Wing leaves no receipt. Valerian's office records the transfer as a loss. The Wing records the transfer as a deposit. The totals of the two offices have diverged by roughly six hundred items since Year 901 and no reconciliation is attempted.

Holdings and hours

The Keeper's own chambers are on Floor 44, adjacent to the vault, and are open to petitioners on the fourth and eleventh days of the month between the second and fifth hours. Petitioners are asked not to speak the component they wish to deposit until the door has closed behind them; the corridor is a public way and the acoustics are poor.

The Keeper's personal register — a single ledger of 1,212 entries, each initialled — is the only complete inventory of the vault. It is not copied, by Valerian's instruction, on the ground that a copy is a second speaking. Two former sub-curators have argued in print that the instruction is a misapplication of Concordance 412 and that the register is a record of components rather than a component. Valerian has answered neither. The ledger remains on the desk, and the desk remains in the room, and the room is locked.

Assessment

Later writers have been unkind. The anonymous Notes on Three Offices (Year 1201) describes Valerian as "a Keeper by accident of a label," and the phrase has stuck, though the author had not read the standing instruction and could not have. The Keeper of the Threshold is said to keep a copy of the Notes in the door-jamb for visitors, which is not the Threshold's to keep. Against this, the vault's contents have not been lost, miscounted, or spoken since Year 1196, which is longer than any of Valerian's predecessors managed and longer than the Precedents Office's memorandum predicted.

The office has not named a successor, and Valerian has not named one either. The rota from Provisional Holdings is due to rotate in Year 1207.