Ordinance 7, Clause Δ-4

Ordinance 7, Clause Δ-4 is the provision of Ordinance 7 governing the disposition of documents that have been read once and are unlikely to be read again. Enacted in the year 4-Σ-119 and amended eleven times without recorded debate, the Clause establishes the class of retired readings — texts which remain in force but are no longer held open — and assigns their custody jointly to the Office of Ordinance Concordance and the sub-clerks of the Fifth Spiral stack. It is among the most cited provisions in the archive and among the least read, a circumstance scholars have described as Clause Δ-4 performing its own subject matter.

The Clause applies only to material that has passed through a single full reading, attested by a clerk's countermark. Documents read twice are governed by Ordinance 302 Clause 14. Documents read no times at all fall outside every ordinance and are, by longstanding practice, placed in the Unentered Stacks and forgotten without prejudice.

Text and structure

The operative sentence has survived six recensions in nearly identical form:

"A reading, once completed, shall be entered as discharged, and the text shall be closed to consultation for a period of no fewer than nine days, at the close of which the clerk of record shall determine whether any party remains under an obligation to know it."

— Ordinance 7, Clause Δ-4, recension 6

The nine-day interval is the provision's most litigated feature. Clause Δ-4 does not define a day, and the Office of Ordinance Concordance has twice ruled that the interval is counted in readings rather than in time, on the reasoning that "the Clause concerns knowing, and knowing has no clock" (Ordinance Gamma-7, Section 12(b)). The Bureau of Intervals has refused to accept this construction on every occasion it has been asked, which is eleven.

The margin of Sub-clause δ

Clause Δ-4 is commonly confused with Ordinance 7, Sub-clause δ, which prohibits access to the Chamber of the Latent Word. The confusion is partly clerical and partly geographical: the two provisions are recorded on facing leaves of the same fascicle, and Sub-clause δ's prohibition appears immediately below Clause Δ-4's nine-day interval, separated only by a rule and a note in a hand no one has identified.

The note reads, in full, "not this one, the other." It has never been construed.

Clerk Hesper Ondrus, whose tenure as countermarker of the Fifth Spiral is otherwise undocumented, filed a memorandum in 6--204 arguing that the margin note was intended to distinguish the two provisions for the benefit of copyists and had been transcribed into the body by a later recension in error. The Office of Ordinance Concordance declined to hear the memorandum, noting that Ondrus had signed it in the margin rather than at the foot, and that a marginal signature "does not make a document" (Ordinance Concordance Minute 6--204/7). Ondrus spent the remainder of the winter recopying the fascicle with the note restored to the margin. The copies were correct, and were filed under Clause Δ-4, and have not been read.

Relation to Annex Delta

Clause 33, Annex Delta of Ordinance 7 was drafted as the containment corollary to Clause Δ-4 and tentatively suggested the principles later operationalized by Ordinance 77-Delta. The two documents have never been reconciled. Annex Delta contemplates a retired reading being sealed and reopened only by petition; Clause Δ-4 by its own terms contemplates the reading simply lapsing. The Office of Ordinance Concordance arbitrates the resulting disputes under its standing warrant over Ordinance 7, Clause IV, usually in favour of whichever party has kept better records of the nine days.

Procedure and its failures

Retirement is entered on the countermark, which is then surrendered to the clerk of record and filed in the Register of Discharged Readings. The register is kept in bound volumes of two hundred leaves; a leaf is removed and destroyed whenever the corresponding text is read a second time, at which point authority over it passes to the Office of Ordinance Concordance. The volume is thus a record of what has not happened.

In the winter of 8--334 the register's forty-first volume went unaccounted for during a recension of the Fifth Spiral. An inquiry under Ordinance Kappa-19 found that the volume had been retired nine days earlier and closed to consultation in accordance with Clause Δ-4. The inquiry concurred with its own finding and recommended no action. Ondrus is not recorded as having commented.

Scholarly disagreement

Whether Clause Δ-4 creates an obligation or dissolves one remains disputed. The dominant reading, traceable to the Proximate Authority commentaries, holds that the Clause discharges the reader and leaves the text under a residual duty to remain available. A minority, associated chiefly with the annotators of the Ninth Recession, maintains the opposite: the text is discharged and the reader must remain available, a construction which would make Clause Δ-4 the only provision in Ordinance 7 to impose obligations on persons rather than documents. The Office of Ordinance Concordance has adopted the second reading in four rulings and the first in five, and has declined to reconcile them on the ground that both cannot be wrong and neither can be right, the matter being one of perspective.

Visitors requiring a certified copy of a retired reading should apply at the Fifth Spiral and allow nine days. The copying is not the delay.