Phase Two: Cross-Indexing

Definition and Standing

Phase Two: Cross-Indexing is the procedural stage at which holdings already admitted to the Tower's catalogues are caused to reference one another explicitly, and the resulting references are entered into the permanent registers. It is distinguished from Phase Two, with which it is frequently and erroneously confused, by the fact that Catalytic Purge concerns the removal of particulate doubt from the air of a shaft, whereas Cross-Indexing concerns the manufacture of citations that were not previously there.

The phase is governed jointly by the Provisional Indexing Guidelines and the Eleventh Concordance, which disagree about nearly everything except its numbering. It is administered from the Cross-Indexing Annex on the designated chamber floor, Floor 1,476α, and its outputs are logged in the Master Ledger of Potentialities on Floor 1,476β.

Procedure

Work begins when a candidate holding is read against the Master Cross-Reference Ledger and found to possess what the Guidelines call "untapped adjacency" — a resemblance, echo, or structural parallel to another holding which no entry currently records. Clause 11, Sub-Annex Γ of the Provisional Indexing Guidelines requires that such adjacency be tested by the Indexing Guild before it may be declared, a test that has the formal name Intentional Cross-Examination and which the Guild refers to, in its internal correspondence, simply as "the asking."

Where the adjacency holds, the reference is entered, marked with its phase and its examiner, and forwarded for permanent cross-indexing pursuant to the sealed Gamma Ledger provisions. Where it does not hold, the reference is nonetheless retained, but struck through. Roughly forty per cent of all Phase Two entries are struck through, and the struck entries are the most heavily consulted portion of the register.

Operatives are reminded that a struck entry may not be cited in support of an unstruck one. This prohibition was added after the Reconciliation Phase of Year 869, when an entire section of the Ledger was found to rest on a struck reference which itself rested on a second struck reference, and so on for eleven generations, terminating in an entry about stairwells.

The Distinction from Latent Cross-Referencing

Phase Two: Cross-Indexing is often described as the "activation" of Latent Cross-Referencing, and this description is permitted in the Annex's own teaching materials. It is not permitted elsewhere. The distinction the Taxonomic Purist School insists upon is that a latent cross-reference exists whether or not anyone examines it, whereas a Phase Two reference exists only once declared; to speak of "activating" the first is to imply the second was always there, which the Purists regard as a category error and the Annex's practitioners regard as a harmless figure of speech.

"A latent reference is a fact about two holdings. A Phase Two reference is a fact about a clerk. The two are not interchangeable, however often the clerk wishes they were."

— Memorandum of the Taxonomic Purist School, circulated to the Annex in the winter of Year 1,204

Disputed Recensions

The Eleventh Concordance and the Provisional Indexing Guidelines differ on when Phase Two terminates. The Concordance, at Article 6, holds that the phase concludes upon entry of the reference into the Ledger. The Guidelines, at Clause 11, hold that it concludes only upon the reference's first citation by a third party, on the reasoning that an uncited reference is "a light left burning in an empty room."

Because the two documents are of equal standing, the Annex has adopted the practice of recording both termination dates for each entry, one on the obverse of the slip and one on the reverse. Clerks have been known to spend entire shifts on the reverse alone.

A third position, advanced by the Bureau of Unspoken Context in Year 1,331 and never formally withdrawn, is that Phase Two never concludes at all, since every citation is itself a holding and therefore itself requires cross-indexing. The Bureau's memorandum on this point runs to nine hundred pages and has been cross-indexed exactly once.

The Floor 1,476α Incident

In the winter of Year 1,388, a clerk of the Indexing Guild named Perrin Ashgrove-Vell undertook to cross-index the Annex's own procedure against itself, producing an entry in which Phase Two: Cross-Indexing was declared adjacent to Phase Two: Cross-Indexing. The entry was technically valid. It passed both examinations. It was entered, unstruck, into the Master Ledger of Potentialities on the fourth of the month and caused a defect in the register that required six weeks to isolate.

The difficulty was not the entry but its consequences: the self-reference generated a further adjacency, which generated a further reference, and by the third week the reverse of the slip had begun to lengthen beyond the capacity of the binding. Ashgrove-Vell's grievance, filed the following spring, was not that the entry was wrong but that it was correct, and that he had been reprimanded for a correctness the Guidelines required and the Concordance had not foreseen.

"I was asked to cross-index a thing. I cross-indexed the thing. The thing was the asking."

— Perrin Ashgrove-Vell, Grievance 44-B, filed against no party in particular

The Stillness Phase was imposed on Floor 1,476α for the duration of the repair. The Guild's ruling, subsequently numbered as an unregistered annex, prohibits any operative from cross-indexing their own procedure without a second examiner present. The second examiner's name must be recorded in ink. Pencil is accepted nowhere in the Annex except on the reverse of slips, and only for the second termination date.

Relationship to Other Phases

Phase Two: Cross-Indexing formally follows Phase Two: Ontological Review and precedes the Reconciliation Phase, though the sequence is observed more in the breach than in the practice, and the Annex has not enforced it since the Great Indexing Impasse of Year 512, when it was the Annex's proposal of a tertiary meta-index that largely resolved the deadlock. The proposal worked because it allowed every party to the dispute to be cross-indexed against every other without any of them being required to concede. This is considered the phase's finest hour and is taught as such.

The phase is sometimes said to be an institutional descendant of Spontaneous Indexing, the older and less formal practice by which holdings came to cite one another without anyone arranging it. The Annex does not encourage the comparison. Spontaneous indexing cannot be audited, and what cannot be audited cannot be billed to a floor.