Ledger of Recurring Time

Definition and custody

The Ledger of Recurring Time is a standing register of intervals which have been observed to repeat, maintained on Floor 402 by the Office of the Duplicate Hour. It is distinct from Absolute Chronology, which records the passage of time once, in the forward direction, in Librarian Standard Intervals; the Ledger of Recurring Time records those intervals which, having passed, have been observed to arrive a second time. Entries are numbered with a decimal prefix indicating the cycle in which the recurrence was noted, so that entry 3.014 and entry 7.014 describe the same observed interval under different cycles of observation.

The Ledger is not a duplicate of any other holding. It is frequently assumed to be, and the assumption has produced three separate filing incidents since the Fifth Concordance was amended. It bears its own seal, its own chain of custody, and its own set of errata.

Structure of entries

Each entry comprises four fields: the interval itself, the floor on which it was observed, the instrument of observation, and the observer's attestation. The interval field is the only one that has never been contested. The floor field is contested regularly, because several floors claim the same observation; the instrument field is contested by the Supervisor of Pendular Time, who holds that a pendulum reading does not constitute an observation of recurring time but only of recurring motion; and the attestation field is contested by whoever is named in it, on the grounds that they did not sign.

The earliest surviving volume, referred to in internal correspondence as the First Recension, covers intervals of between four seconds and eleven minutes. Later volumes extend the range considerably. The Seventh Recension, begun in the winter of the 440s, includes an entry for an interval of forty-one days, which the Office of the Duplicate Hour declined to certify and which the Clerks of the Recurring Minute nevertheless transcribed into their own schedule for Floor 709.

Relationship to the Kalendar

The Ledger and the Kalendar of Recurring Errors, maintained by the Logic Guild, are maintained independently and reconcile badly. The Kalendar records errors; the Ledger records intervals. An interval may recur without error, and an error may recur without interval. Where the two are compared, the discrepancies are noted in a standing appendix, the Concordance of Apparent Coincidences, which has not been updated since the tenure of the Fifth Registrar.

A notable instance concerns Error 44-C, which the Kalendar attributes to a failure of Impossible Lullaby protocol. The Ledger contains no corresponding entry, because the interval associated with Error 44-C — three minutes, forty seconds — was recorded under the First Recension and subsequently lost when the Third Recension was rebound without its errata leaf. The Logic Guild maintains that the interval therefore did not recur. The Office of the Duplicate Hour maintains that it recurred and was lost, which are different things.

The Eleven-Year Dispute

From the 390s to the 400s the Ledger was subject to a jurisdictional contest between the Office of the Duplicate Hour and the Committee for Linear Time. The Committee held that any interval observed twice fell, on the second observation, under linear time and therefore under its own authority. The Office held that the recurrence was a property of the interval and not of its observation. The matter was heard eleven times by the Standing Committee on Registral Procedure and adjourned each time, in keeping with that body's ordinary practice, though the Ledger's own appendix records the eleventh adjournment as "the first in which the appellant did not appear."

The dispute is often conflated with the dispute between the Committee for Linear Time and the Looped Hour (Recurring), which concerns jurisdiction over a place rather than over a register. The two disputes share a chairman for four years, a fact which the Concordance treats as decisive and which the parties treat as an administrative accident.

"A recurrence is not a second occurrence. The distinction is the whole of the register, and those who cannot maintain it should be reassigned to the floor of the unrepeatable."

— Registrar Halve, Seventh Concordance, Annex 12

The errata problem

Because entries are numbered by cycle, a correction to an early entry creates a cascade of corrections to later entries, since the same interval appears in each cycle in which it was observed. The cascade has, on two occasions, exceeded the length of the Ledger itself; the Fourth Recension's errata were moved to a separate volume, which is now longer than the volume it corrects. Visitors to Floor 402 are asked not to consult the errata volumes without a clerk present, as turning the spine of the Fourth Recension's errata past the 600th leaf has been known to dislodge loose slips that have never been refiled.

See also

• Ledger Entry
• Antecedent Time
• Standard Time Alcove
• Survey of Recurring Faces
• Stairwell Epsilon