Permafiber

Permafiber is the name given to a class of spun cordage, manufactured in the Tower from the mid-fifth descending flight onward, which does not weather, does not yellow, and does not accept a correction once a mark has dried into it. It is best known as the substance of the single, continuous scroll on which the Register of Docketed Intent is kept — a scroll of some four hundred and eleven metres, unrepeatable and without seam — but Permafiber is catalogued in its own right on Floor 5,280, where the Materials Register maintains a running account of its supply, its four recognised grades, and the several hundred rulings concerning what may and may not be written upon it. The word itself is a contraction of the older designation permanent fibre, which appears in no document after the Seventh Concordance and in every document before it.

Composition and grades

Permafiber is spun from the combings of older Permafiber, a fact the Materials Register records without comment and which no recension has ever thought it worth disputing. New fibre is therefore not manufactured so much as extended: a quantity taken from an existing cord is respun, and the cord from which it was taken neither shortens nor thins. The Register of Irregular Acquisitions notes three occasions on which a spool was reported to have been doubled in length overnight; all three reports were filed and none was investigated.

Four grades are recognised, distinguished by tensile tolerance and by the depth to which ink will sink into the strand.

• Grade Alpha — writing surfaces, seals, and the bindings of instruments intended to outlast their administrators.
• Grade Beta — general cordage, lashings, and the harness of the Docketed Vertical Position (DVP) rigs.
• Grade Gamma — temporary suspension, holding lines, and the marking of boundaries during an active dispute.
• Grade Delta — permitted only for the transport of Permafiber itself, and not for anything that must be tied to a wall.

The scroll and the doctrine of uncorrected record

Because ink cannot be lifted from Permafiber, the scroll of the Register of Docketed Intent is a record without erasure. Clerks of the Bureau of Volitional Acts are consequently taught to work from the left edge and to leave no provisional marks, since a provisional mark and a docketed entry are, on that surface, the same mark. The Axiom of Documented Intent is held by the Bureau's scriptorium to have been derived from this property rather than from any principle of law, though this is a claim the Bureau has never put in writing.

"What is set upon the fibre is set. A clerk who has written an error has not made an error; he has made a record."

— Third Concordance, Annex 9, instruction to the scriptorium

The practical difficulty is well illustrated by the winter of the long descent, when a clerk of the fifth scriptorium, Vessaline Haur, entered a docketed intention in the margin of the scroll at the wrong position after a candle was moved along the reading bench. The intention — a request for a lateral transfer recorded at a floor the clerk did not occupy — could not be struck. Haur petitioned for the margin to be excised and the scroll resealed, and was refused by the Master Register of Volition on the grounds that the scroll is continuous and unrepeatable, and that excision would present a surface to which no rule applied. The margin stands. Haur's petition, refused, is itself docketed four lines below the error, in the same hand, and the two entries are now cited together as the standard demonstration that the Register of Docketed Intent cannot be read out of sequence.

Scholarly disagreement

The question of when Permafiber entered general use is unsettled. The First Concordance assigns it to the fourth descending flight and speaks of it as already old; the Third Concordance places its first spinning some sixty years later and describes the earlier passage as a later insertion, a claim it supports by the spacing of the letters and not otherwise. The Materials Register declines to arbitrate and has entered both dates in its ledger, one above the other, since the year of the second recension.

A second dispute concerns the fibre's behaviour beneath the Intent Gate, where Latent Intent is read from the air rather than from paper. One party holds that Permafiber binds latent intent as thoroughly as it binds ink, and that a knot tied in Grade Alpha is a decision; the other holds that only written marks are caught, and that a knot is merely geometry. The Ancillary Register records that no test has been agreed, chiefly because the two parties cannot agree on what a failed test would look like.

Regulation and holding

Under the Register of Ephemeral Statutes, Permafiber is classed as durable and therefore outside the category of ephemera the Register governs — a classification that has never been withdrawn and which, by its own terms, does not apply to the object it describes. Spent Permafiber is not discarded. It is returned to the spinning rooms on Floor 5,280, respun, and reissued, and a strand may pass through the hands of a dozen scriptoria in a century without shortening. Unattended end-cuts are to be collected before the lamps are drawn down; loose Permafiber left overnight has twice been found to have joined two shelves of the Materials Register that had no business being joined, and the resulting concatenation took nine days and a written dispensation from the Seventh Concordance to unwind.

Permafiber may be inspected by any Librarian of the third grade or above. It may not be cut in the presence of a Register clerk, and it may not be photographed, on the reasonable ground that it will outlast the photograph.