Ledger of Circulatory Anomalies

Scope and custody

The Ledger of Circulatory Anomalies is a bound archival register maintained under the general authority of the Ledger of Persistent Anomalies, Volume VII, devoted exclusively to anomalies of circulation: the movement of fluids, air, crowds, paperwork, and heat through passages that were not surveyed for that purpose. It is held in the Scriptorium of Second Circulation, on the landing between floors 812 and 813, where the air moves in one direction regardless of the season.

The ledger comprises four codices, each covering a period of roughly ninety Tower years, though the boundaries between them are administrative rather than chronological. Codex II opens in the middle of a quarter and closes two years before its stated end date; the discrepancy is noted in the front matter and has never been resolved.

Relationship to other ledgers

Circulatory anomalies were originally recorded in the general body of the Ledger of Persistent Anomalies, Volume VII, and only extracted into a dedicated volume following the events of the Winter of Standing Water on floor -33. The extraction was performed by Clerk Ostrehan, whose marginalia on the transfer order survives and reads, in full: "They will not stay in the common file." The extraction order itself is cited in Ruling 188-A, which remains the governing citation for disputes over whether a given phenomenon belongs to circulation or to the acoustic file handled by Volume II: Acoustic Residuals.

The relationship to Ledger of Initial Anomalies is one of provenance rather than custody: several circulatory anomalies now living in Codex I were first sealed and logged in the initial register, and their entries here carry the stamp of transfer rather than original observation.

Classification of entries

Entries are classified by the medium circulated, not by the passage through which it moves. The four standing classes are:

• Hydric — water, standing or moving, including anomalies where water circulates without a containing vessel.
• Aeriform — drafts, sighs, and the residual air-movements catalogued under Volume II: Acoustic Residuals where they exhibit directional persistence.
• Processional — the circulation of persons, most famously the counterclockwise descent observed on Stairwell Beta.
• Paperly — the circulation of documents, including the well-known phenomenon in which a returned file re-enters the queue ahead of its own reference number.

The fourth class was added after a dispute between the Scriptorium of Second Circulation and the office responsible for Procedures for Ledger Reconciliation, in which each insisted the other had misplaced a requisition slip forty-one times in a single quarter. Both were correct.

Governing precedents

Circulatory questions are settled by reference to Ruling 188-A (see also Register of Coincidental Proximities, whose entries on floor adjacency have been cited in support of both sides of the standing water question). Where Ruling 188-A is silent, the ledger falls back on the older Ledger of Kinetic Mechanisms, which treats circulation as a special case of motion and therefore claims jurisdiction. The overlap is acknowledged in the Concordances and left unreconciled.

"A circulation is not a motion; a motion does not return."

— Ruling 188-A, clause 3

The Codex III lacuna

Between the entry numbered 3,109 and the entry numbered 3,110 of Codex III there is a gap of some twelve pages, torn rather than cut. The ledger's custodians record the loss without speculation. The gap coincides with the period in which the Ledger of Initial Anomalies was being rebound, and a persistent but unattributed theory holds that the two events are the same event observed from two directions. The theory has never been entered into the Concordances and is therefore not citable.

Standing notes

Visitors to the Scriptorium of Second Circulation are asked to observe the direction of the air at the landing and to stand on the side it does not favour. Reading in the scriptorium is permitted; folding the leaves backward against the grain is not, as the paper remembers.