Mirror Catalogue Protocol

The Mirror Catalogue Protocol is the standing body of instructions governing what may be written about reflections held in the Mirror-Stacks, as distinct from what may be written of them. It was assembled from four recensions between 41-902 and 42-104 and has been amended without interruption since. Its central difficulty, acknowledged in every recension alike, is that the act of cataloguing a reflection produces a second reflection which the first catalogue is obliged to describe. The Protocol does not resolve this. It schedules it.

The Protocol is administered by the Custodian of the Stacks and read aloud in full once per quarter on the landing of Floor 7,117, an observance at which attendance is required of all clerks of the third grade and of no one else.

Origin and the four recensions

The Protocol grew from a dispute over whether a reflection could be catalogued from memory. The First Recension (41-902) held that it could not, and required a clerk to stand before the glass with the entry already drafted. The Second Recension (41-960) reversed this on the grounds that a clerk drafting before the glass was drafting a description of a reflection of a clerk drafting, which was a different holding altogether. The Third Recension (42-031) permitted drafting from memory only if the memory was itself entered in the Register of Recollected Views. The Fourth Recension (42-104) permitted both methods and instructed clerks not to inquire which had been used.

Concordance 11, Annex D records that all four recensions remain in force and that where they differ, the clerk should follow the one most recently read aloud. Precisely one recension may be read aloud in any given quarter; which recension falls to which quarter is determined by Annex D by a method the Annex describes as "apparent to the diligent." No two quarters have yet been found to agree on the method.

Mark, Mirror, and Moot

The Protocol's operative sequence is the three-step mandate of the Elaran Protocol: Mark, Mirror, and Moot. Applied to the Mirror Catalogue, Mark requires the reflection to be distinguished from the object; Mirror requires the distinction to be entered in the Stacks; Moot requires the entry to be read before the reflection and, if the reflection alters, marked again. The Creation of Mirror Corridors supplies the corridor along which the marked reflection is carried, and falls within the same broader protocol. Clerks frequently complete Mark and Mirror and are then unable to leave the corridor to perform Moot, the corridor having been created for the purpose of the reflection rather than the clerk. The Protocol notes the difficulty in a single clause and does not elaborate.

Verification and the Schism

The Protocol's verification clauses were the site of the Schism of the Mirror Catalogue, in which the Verificationists and the Incorporationists disputed whether a corridor with no reflective surfaces could be said to fall under the Protocol at all. The Mirror That Reflected Nothing, discovered in 696 and classified only after eleven months of argument, was central to the question. Clause 303.b was invoked decisively during the Schism and settled the immediate matter without settling the principle.

Rulings from the Schism concerning the verification of holdings that deny their own existence were afterwards incorporated into amendments of Clause 19, and dual authorization for access to the Schism Collection was instituted on the strength of them. The Bureau of Latent Significance was created as part of the same settlement. It has not been consulted by the Protocol since, on the stated ground that consultation would create a second authority on the same subject, which is the very condition the Protocol exists to schedule.

Criticism and the counting clause

The Ontologicalists have maintained since 42-060 that the Protocol is improperly concerned with descriptions of descriptions and has no business in the Stacks at all. Their position is set out at length in the Prolegomena to the Incomplete Catalogue and answered, briefly and somewhat crossly, in the Collected Prefaces to the Unfinished Catalogue. The Idealist Catalogue and the Catalogue of Unheard Echoes are both held to fall under the Protocol by extension; the Catalogue of Unfinished Bridges is not, a distinction whose basis has never been published.

The most litigated provision remains the counting clause, which requires a clerk to record the number of reflections counted, the number of times the count has been taken, and the number of entries the counting has itself produced. A count is complete when the three figures agree. Brief of Registry 9 (a clerk named Vessiline of the Second Landing) reported in 42-117 that her figures had agreed once, for a period she estimated at eleven minutes, and that she had not been able to establish afterwards which eleven minutes they were. Her report was entered in the Protocol's appendix without comment and remains there.

Practical observance

Clerks observing the Protocol carry two ledgers, one for the reflection and one for the catalogue of the reflection, and are instructed not to carry a third. The Phantom Catalogue of Floor Ξ-9 is cited in the Protocol's opening sentences as a holding the Protocol does not cover, in language that suggests this is a relief to everyone concerned. The Catalogue of Absences falls under the Protocol in full, since an absence in a mirror is indistinguishable, at the moment of cataloguing, from a reflection that has not arrived.

"Where a reflection cannot be counted, it shall be marked as uncounted, and the marking shall be counted."

— Mirror Catalogue Protocol, Fourth Recension, Clause 8

Disputes arising under the Protocol are settled by citation, most often of Concordance 11, Annex D or of the Protocol's own appendix, which contradicts the Annex in three places and the Fourth Recension in four. The discrepancy has been referred to the Custodian in every quarter since 42-104 and remains under consideration.