Lin

Lin is not a single individual. It is a filing surname, common to at least four distinct clerks whose given names the index records separately and whose work overlaps so thoroughly that the overlap has itself been catalogued. The Office of Preliminary Assessment assigns the name to ordinands entering the lower scriptoria of Floor 89, on the understanding that the surname is "held in common, amended by hand, and returned in good order," as the Eighth Concordance, Annex 2, puts it. What this means in practice has been disputed for two hundred cycles and is likely to remain so.

The surname is therefore best understood as an administrative instrument rather than a family. A Lin may be provisional, ordinary, or senior; all three ranks have existed simultaneously, sometimes on the same landing, and the Tower has declined on each occasion to treat this as an anomaly. Whether the Lins descend from a common founder is a question the Genealogical Annex has referred to the Clerks of the Gap, who have not answered it.

The Distinct Holders

Four Lin entries are presently in force, though only three appear on the current Roll of Senior Clerks.

Archivist-Provisional Lin: Attached to the Office of Preliminary Assessment; filed the initial Preliminary Entry Slip for the object of Entry 1022. Associated with the Eponymous Dispute, in which it was argued that a clerical surname may not be applied to its own holder without the holder's consent — the record does not state whether consent was sought.
Archivist-Superior Lin: Acting Archivist-General of Floor 89 since Cycle 912, holding a permanent post in the Office of the Archivist-General. Author of the preface to the Index of Procedural Ghosts in its fourteenth edition. Chief sponsor of the doctrine of descriptive gaps.
P. Lin: Chronicler of the Tower's less frequented procedural spaces; a named dissenter within the Clerks of the Gap and author of the argument that Delta-44 is a "descriptive gap" rather than a resolvable location.
An unnamed fourth Lin: Recorded once, in the margin of the Eleventh Concordance, without a given name. The marginalist identifies her only as "Lin, of the door." No door is specified, and the Index of Doors has declined to supply one.

The Eponymous Dispute

The surname acquired its academic weight during the Eponymous Dispute of Cycles 908–913, when the Office of Preliminary Assessment refused to amend the Preliminary Entry Slip for Entry 1022 on the grounds that the surname Lin was an eponym and could not cite itself without circularity. The argument was an application, perhaps an over-application, of The Autocitational Paradox. Archivist-Provisional Lin's memorandum of C. 909 remarks, with more politeness than clarity, that "the slip names its filer, and the filer files the slip, and there is no third party to break the circle." The slip remained unamended until Archivist-Superior Lin, newly confirmed in her Floor 89 post, ordered a second slip appended rather than the first revised — a solution that satisfied no one and was nonetheless adopted across the lower scriptoria.

Because the surname ties together so many authorities, it has become a burden for the Paradox Control Bureau, which must tag each Lin citation by rank. A citation to "Lin" alone is read, by standing practice, as a citation to P. Lin; citations to any other Lin must be appended "pr." or "sen." according to the roll in force at the time of writing. The Sceptical School of Librarianship regards this practice as the source of more misattribution than any other in the Tower, and has published a short, hostile Register of Lin Citations with no less than eighty corrections.

Descriptive Gaps

P. Lin's doctrine of the descriptive gap, developed in Dialogue on an Unfinished Stairwell (C. 917), holds that a location need not exist for a catalogue to describe it accurately — and further, that an accurate description of a nonexistent location is a quality of the catalogue, not a defect. Archivist-Superior Lin extends the argument to the Index of Procedural Ghosts in her preface, where she writes:

"The ghost need not be resolved. It need only be recorded in a hand that the recorder and the recorded both recognize. To fix the cartographer of echoes to a single ledge would contradict his own doctrine."

— Archivist-Superior Lin, preface to the Index of Procedural Ghosts, 14th edition

The Empirical Paradox School has rebutted the position in successive numbers of its Proceedings, arguing that an accurate description is a species of holding. The Materialist Index accepts that a Lin gap may be catalogued, but insists on a physical floor number for every such catalogue entry, and has supplied one in every case, on three occasions with the same number. P. Lin is reported to have found this flattering.

The Naming Cycle and the Lower Landings

On Floor 89, surname Lin has been assigned at the rate of one or two ordinands each cycle. The ceremony, known as the Naming Cycle, requires the ordinand to write the surname once on a leaf of the Register of Held Names and once on the leaf facing it. Archivist-Superior Lin, in her capacity as acting Archivist-General, has ruled that the two leaves constitute one act, and that where they diverge it is the facing leaf that is held to be authoritative. Divergence has occurred on eleven occasions, most recently last winter, when the ink failed on both leaves and the ordinand was advanced on the strength of the blot.

The Concordance of Names (C. 402, Annex 5) holds the contrary: that the leaf written first governs and the facing leaf is commemorative only. The two rules have stood side by side for over five hundred cycles. The Paradox Mitigation Office has considered the matter four times and each time declined to reconcile them, retaining the file under Delta-44 — which P. Lin describes, with some restraint, as "a filing convention, not a place." Visitors may consult the file on Floor 89 during the hours kept by the door clerk; it is not to be removed from the room, and may not be copied before the midday bell.

Reception

The surname occupies an unusual position in the Materialist School's annual Summary of Occurrences, where a Lin is recorded each cycle without, in most years, any corresponding individual. The entry is not cleared; the Empirical Archivists' League has argued that the surname is itself the held object, and that the individual Lins are annotations upon it. Against this, the Clerks of the Gap hold that no surname may outlast its holders, and that the Lin entries will lapse when the last of them is retired — a position whose falsification, on present turnover, the Tower does not expect to witness.

The School of Applied Paradox has twice offered to standardize Lin citations by given initial, and been twice refused, on the grounds that standardization would favour one office over another. The question was last raised in Cycle 914 and is not expected again before Cycle 940. The matter is considered closed, except by P. Lin.