Office of the Mid-Range Archivist

The Office of the Mid-Range Archivist is a concordant body of the Tower, established under Concordance 3 and charged with the maintenance of conceptual custody over all median-state phenomena within the designated Mid-Range bracket. Its seat is Spiral 7, though the greater part of its working holdings are distributed through Spiral 772 and the surrounding mid-range strata of the Spiral Stacks. The Office is neither a scriptorium nor a curatorial college in the ordinary sense; it is the Tower's instrument for holding a thing in the condition of being neither present nor absent, and its records are consequently the most heavily annotated and least frequently consulted in the mid-range.

Founding and jurisdiction

The Office was constituted on 14 Bloom, 212nd Spiral — the ratification date conventionally taken as the opening of the modern concordant era — by the third article of Concordance 3, which assigned to the new body "the keeping of all phenomena intermediate, unresolved, or pending, together with their unsounded tones." The framers appear to have intended a narrow remedy: the floor-numbers of the Mid-Range bracket had recently been disputed in a series of hearings before the Office of the Archivist-General, and some standing custodian was required for the measurements arising from those disputes.

The jurisdiction did not remain narrow. Within eleven spirals the Office had absorbed the registry of unsounded tones, the ledger of pending attributions, and the deductive absence returns formerly filed with the Proctorate. A note appended to the Office's first recension observes, without comment, that the volume of intermediate material increases whenever the Office is given more room in which to keep it.

Unsounded tones and the custody problem

An unsounded tone is a tone whose notation is complete and whose sounding has not occurred. The Office holds them in the manner of a library holding a book it has catalogued but not opened; custody is real, and the ordinary tests for it — counting, weighing, comparing against a standard — do not apply. Concordance 3, Annex 4 addresses the difficulty directly:

"That which is held in the middle state is held by warrant and not by presence. The Archivist shall not be required to produce it, nor shall any party be heard to say it is not held."

— Concordance 3, Annex 4, clause 2

The practical consequence is a filing system in which nothing can be confirmed except by the record of its own custody. Librarian-Scribe Valerius, working in the 14-Δ period at floors roughly 12,400–12,550, catalogued unsounded tones by the trace they left in the absences around them, a method the Office adopted in 14-Δ-88 and has never formally revised.

The dispute with the Cartographers

The Office's longest-running disagreement is with the Office of Cartographer Archivist over whether a median-state phenomenon may be mapped. The Cartographers hold that anything occupying a position may be plotted; the Office holds that a phenomenon in custody has no position, only a filing number, and that plotting it produces a map of the Office rather than of the phenomenon.

The matter was litigated for four spirals and settled, in a manner of speaking, by the issuance of two amendments. Third Concordance, Amendment 17.δ affirms that "bracketed phenomena shall be charted only at the scale of the bracket." The Cartographers have since produced charts at that scale, on which every Mid-Range floor appears as a single mark. The Office has filed these charts among its own holdings, where they occupy a shelf.

Archivist Valerius — not to be confused with the Librarian-Scribe of the same name — argued in his non-Euclidean cartography papers that the fault lay with the ordinal system itself, and that floors numbered without sequence could not be charted without first being numbered by sequence. He was overruled by the Office of the Archivist, which ruled that the question of sequence was not before it.

Structure and officers

The Office is headed by a Mid-Range Archivist, appointed for a term of one bracket and confirmed by the Office of the Archivist-General. Reporting officers include the Deputy Custodian of Unsounded Tones, the Keeper of the Absence Ledgers, and the Notary of Pending Attributions, an office that has stood vacant since the departure of Archivist-Lieutenant M. Kael, who did not resign but was seconded to the Mid-Spiral Textile Repository and has not returned.

Appointment is by internal nomination. No external petition for a post in the Office has succeeded since 212nd Spiral, and the nomination rolls list, in their final column, the number of tones each candidate has personally heard sounded. The column is blank throughout.

Criticism and the Elara petition

The Office's competence was challenged most sharply by Elara of the Twelfth Spiral, who in the course of her campaign for the re-numbering of several mid-range floors argued that an Office holding phenomena "in the middle" could not itself decide where the middle lay. Her petition, filed under Annex Δ, was rejected on the ground that the Office's custody concerns the state of phenomena and not the numbering of floors — a distinction her reply describes as "the difference between a house and its address."

Some later clerks have found the objection difficult. A private memorandum of the Office, circulated in 14-Δ-102 and never ratified, concedes that the distinction holds only so long as the bracket boundaries remain undisputed, and that they have not remained undisputed. The memorandum was filed with the pending attributions and is therefore, under the Office's own rules, neither confirmed nor withdrawn.

Visitors to the reading rooms of Spiral 772 are reminded that unsounded tones may not be hummed.