Pathway Validation

Pathway Validation is the standing term for the aggregate of procedures by which a Validation Pathway is confirmed as valid while itself being conducted along a pathway. The circularity is acknowledged in the record and is not regarded as a defect. Third Concordance, Annex γ, §1 states the position plainly: "A pathway is validated by traversal, and traversal is validation; the two are not to be separated by the clerk, the auditor, or the panel." The same annex sets out the standard seven-step sequence now used throughout the Tower, and no amendment has yet displaced it.

Relation to the Validation Pathway

Pathway Validation should be distinguished from the Validation Pathway itself. The Pathway is the procedure; Pathway Validation is the finding that the procedure holds when applied to itself. Initial Validation of any subject requires the pathway to be traversed in full, and the traversal concludes with a Pathway Validation entry, which is then subject to Recursive Validation under Third Concordance, Annex γ, §2. Clerks of long standing describe this as "closing the loop," though the phrase appears in no formal instrument and is discouraged in filings.

The distinction matters chiefly at the point of dispute. In the grievance of Wren Halloway, brought in the winter of 489, the complainant argued that Pathway Validation and pathway certification were the same act under different names. The Directorate of Conditional Pathway Maintenance declined jurisdiction, observing that a certification is not a pathway, and the grievance was returned unread. Halloway's subsequent appeal, filed on the reverse of the original, was returned unread for the same reason.

The Seven-Step Sequence

Under Annex γ, a Pathway Validation proceeds through seven steps, of which the fourth — the sequestering of the subject — is the one most often contested. The Validation Pathway requires the subject to be sequestered for the duration of internal validation, and Pathway Validation inherits this requirement. Where the subject is a document, the document is sequestered. Where the subject is a floor, the floor is closed. Where the subject is a clerk, the clerk is sequestered and remains on the payroll, a provision introduced by Fifth Concordance, §14, after the sequestration of eleven clerks in the winter of 402 left their families without stipend and their desks without occupants.

Steps five and six — the reading-back and the countersignature — are frequently combined in practice, a compression the Directorate has tolerated since 461 but has never endorsed in writing. The omission of step seven, the entry of the finding, is the most common cause of a Pathway Validation being held void ab initio. In 474, the entire third-quarter finding for floors 218 through 240 was voided when the entering clerk made her entries in the Central Pathway Register without first confirming she was authorized to do so. She was not.

Audit and the Register

Every Pathway Validation is subject to a Pathway Audit, being the application of Recursive Validation to the specific procedural stream. Only clerks of the Directorate of Conditional Pathway Maintenance may make entries in the Central Pathway Register, and the Register is the primary tool by which a Pathway Audit is conducted. A panel must convene for any significant modification to a pathway's conditional parameters, and the panel must include a specialist of the Directorate.

The Latent Pathway Census of winter 488 inventoried 1,442 pathways, of which 1,109 were found to carry a live Pathway Validation. The remaining 333 were recorded as "validated in principle, unvalidated in fact," a category the Census Committee invented and the Directorate has never accepted. The discrepancy between the two offices has not been resolved; the Census returns are filed one floor above the Register and the two have not been collated since 491.

Points of Scholarly Disagreement

The chief disagreement concerns the duration of a valid finding. The Directorate advances a reading, set out in its circular of 486, that a prescribed pathway extends indefinitely for the duration of the Tower's structural continuity, and that a Pathway Validation, once entered, requires no renewal. Against this, the annotators of the Third Concordance hold that Annex γ, §4 requires each validation to be re-traversed at the close of every fifth spiral, and that a finding older than five spirals is presumptively void.

"A finding not re-traversed within five spiral-closes is to be treated as a finding of the previous age, and cited only with a note of its age."

— Third Concordance, Annex γ, §4, marginal gloss of the second recension

A second and older dispute concerns whether the Precept of Recursive Validation applies to the validating clerk as well as to the validated pathway. The Principle of Latent Validation suggests that any path capable of validation is already, latently, validated, and that the traversal is therefore a formality. The Bureau of Validation has declined to rule on the point, noting that Procedural Anomaly Validation is the proper channel for questions of this kind and that no such question has yet been referred to it in the correct form.

Record of Findings

Completed findings are held in the annexe adjoining the Register hall. The earliest continuous run begins at floor 61 in the year 344 and is uninterrupted except for the period 377–379, when the annexe was closed for resealing and no findings were entered. The annexe is open to accredited clerks on the second and fourth days of the week; boots are to be removed at the threshold and carried, not worn, to the reading stands.