Phantom Sheep

Phantom Sheep (Ovis phantasma) is a domesticated ruminant of the family Bovidae, maintained in enclosed flocks on the upper pastoral floors and culled under licence for the preparation of Phantom Vellum. The species is not visible to the unaided eye and is not, for practical purposes, absent. Its hide is the only known substrate that will hold the ink formula specified in the Third Concordance, and the Librarians have accordingly classified the animal as a protected instrument of record rather than as livestock, a distinction that has caused friction with the Upper Pastoral Office for the better part of two centuries.

Description

The living animal is detected by its effect on surrounding air, which it cools by an average of 0.4 degrees within a radius of one and a half paces. Flocks are therefore counted by thermometer. A mature ewe measures roughly one hundred and ten centimetres at the withers by the reckoning of the Grazing Survey of the Ninth Spiral, though the Survey concedes that this figure was obtained by measuring the shadow of an animal that had already been led away, and that the shadow may have belonged to the shepherd.

Phantom Sheep graze on ordinary pasture and produce ordinary dung, which is the principal evidence of their presence and the reason the flocks are rotated on a fourteen-day cycle. Wool may be shorn from a Phantom Sheep, but it will not stay shorn; the fleece reconstitutes itself within a night, and the clippings dissolve on the floor of the shearing shed by morning, leaving a faint greasy mark. This mark is collected and sold to the Guild of Marginalia for the sizing of interleaves.

Vellum and the Third Concordance

The Third Concordance designated the Phantom Sheep and fixed the ink formula for Phantom Vellum in the same annex, on the reasoning that an animal which cannot be seen should not be recorded on a page which can. Annex 4 states the principle plainly:

"Let the hide of the Phantom Sheep bear the record of things that are not, and let no other skin be used, lest the record be found in the world."

— Third Concordance, Annex 4

Preparation of the hide is carried out by the Vellum Quarter on Floor 612 under conditions of continuous dimness. The flaying itself is performed with Attenuated Nickel-Silver blades, which leave no impression on the animal and consequently no evidence that the operation occurred. A dispute has run since the Eighth Concordance over whether a sheep so treated is dead; the Eighth holds that it is, the Eleventh Concordance that it was never alive in the sense contemplated by the Third, and the Vellum Quarter that the question is not theirs and the hides have been delivered regardless.

Relation to the Silent Sheep

Phantom Sheep are frequently confused with the Silent Sheep of Azure Pastures, and the confusion is the fault of the archive. Both are ovine, both are kept on the upper floors, and both were the subject of instruments issued in the same administrative year. They are not related. The Silent Sheep of Azure Pastures are visible, audible to a degree, and were elevated to a Statutory Species by Ordinance 12; their wool carries chromatophoric properties of commercial value and they are kept as auxiliary flocks on Floor 899, in the Azure Pastures.

The distinction was drawn too late to prevent the Matter of the Two Flocks, in which a requisition for forty fleeces intended for the Azure Guild was served instead upon the Phantom flock on Floor 887 during the winter of the 43rd Spiral. The requisitioning clerk, Clerk Amaranth Vey, recorded delivery of forty fleeces and received a receipt for none. Her subsequent memorandum — that she had "counted the sheep twice and been uncertain both times" — is preserved in the Register of Unsatisfactory Deliveries and is cited in the training of requisition clerks to this day. Vey was not disciplined. The flock was not recovered.

Counting and the Thermometry Question

Because the species cannot be seen, all census work depends on instruments, and the instruments disagree. The Phantom Thermometry Scale, defined in the Seventh Concordance, was designed for the phaneric field dependency of Phantom Alloys and was never intended for livestock; applied to a flock it returns readings that vary with the confidence of the operator. The Upper Pastoral Office uses the Scale. The Grazing Survey of the Ninth Spiral uses a trained dog, which is blind to the sheep but unsettled by them, and whose barking is scored on a five-point index.

The two methods have never agreed. In the census of the 44th Spiral the Scale returned a flock of one hundred and forty-one on Floor 887; the dog returned a flock of indefinite size but "considerable". The Upper Pastoral Office maintains that the Scale is authoritative and the dog is a convenience. The Grazing Survey of the Ninth Spiral maintains the reverse, noting that the Scale's own annex warns against application to "warm-blooded subjects, however faintly warm". No reconciliation has been attempted since the Twelfth Concordance declined to hear the matter on the grounds that it had already been heard.

Record and phantom risk

Master catalogue entries that refer to individual Phantom Sheep must be made on Phantom Vellum, in accordance with the standing rule on Bibliographic Phantoms. Entries made on ordinary stock generate Phantom Appendices, which accumulate at the back of the volume and, in the case of the Floor 887 herd-book, have added some nine hundred pages of unrequested genealogical material since 44.2. The herd-book is now bound in three volumes, of which the third is entirely appendices and is not consulted.

A separate hazard attaches to the animals themselves. A Phantom Sheep that has been named in a register tends to persist in the record after it has been culled, and the resulting discrepancy is indistinguishable from a Documentary Phantom until the carcass is examined, which it cannot be. Keepers are therefore instructed not to name their animals, and to refer to them by ear-tag number only. The instruction is widely ignored. The Floor 887 flock is known to its shepherds as the Congregation, and the oldest ewe, unnumbered in any register, is called Old Certainty.