Provisocol 7

Provisocol 7 is the seventh of the Seventeen Provisional Protocols, the instrument governing the classification and behaviour of measurements that were taken before the instrument that took them had been approved. It is, by the reckoning of the Office of Temporal Reconciliation, the shortest of the seventeen at four hundred and nine words, and the most litigated at any length at all.

Provisocol 7 was sealed in the eleventh session of the Committee of Concordant Reconciliation and carries the full title On the Standing of Figures Obtained Prior to Certification, and the Disposition of Instruments Responsible. Its operative clause requires only that such a figure "be entered in the ledger, and marked." What a mark is, and where it goes, Provisocol 7 declines to say. The omission has occupied the Tower for two hundred and forty years.

Origins

The Protocol arose from the Reconciliation of the Seventeen Calendars, which had produced, by its own admission, an inventory of dates that no single instrument on the relevant floors could have generated. Provisocol 12, Annex C, later assigned the general problem of uncertified observation to the Provisocols as a class; Provisocol 7 had already been in force for a generation when that annex was drafted, and the Committee has never reconciled the sequence.

Its drafting is attributed to the clerk Osia Vell, who is recorded in the session minutes as having objected to the wording and then signed it anyway. Her marginal note survives in the fair copy held on Floor 44: "A mark is not a word, and I will not pretend it is." The note is not part of the sealed text and has never been cited successfully in argument.

The Mark Question

Three readings of the mark have achieved standing. The positional reading holds that the mark is a location in the ledger — a column, a margin, or a floor of its own — and is supported by the Third Concordance, Annex 4, which speaks of "the place of the uncertified figure" as though it were an address. The nominal reading holds that the mark is a designation appended to the figure, and is supported by the Office of Spatial Reconciliation on the ground that nothing in the Tower has ever been assigned a place without also being assigned a name.

The material reading, favoured by the Guild of Horologists, holds that the mark is a physical stamp applied to the instrument, since Provisocol 7's title concerns "the Disposition of Instruments Responsible." The Guild has stamped some four thousand instruments since the reading was first advanced. No instrument has ever been refused entry to a floor on account of a stamp, and no instrument has been admitted on account of one either.

"The mark is applied. Whether it is applied to the figure, the ledger, or the instrument is a question for the floor, and the floor has been asked."

— Guild of Horologists, Circular 18 (On Stamps)

Application and the Aperture Incident

Provisocol 7 is invoked most often at the Apertures, where readings are routinely taken by parties who have not been certified to take them and frequently by parties who are not present. In the winter of the year the Office of Temporal Reconciliation records as 1,208, a survey party on the Ascent returned with two hundred and eleven readings taken through an aperture that had not yet been opened. The Office declined to mark them, on the ground that a reading taken through an unopened aperture is not a reading but a prediction, and that Provisocol 7 governs figures, not forecasts.

The survey party appealed, citing Concordant Law on the standing of instruments rather than observers. The Committee sat for nine days and produced a ruling of one sentence: "The figures are entered." They were entered without a mark, and remain so. The relevant ledger page is checked quarterly by a clerk who is required to confirm that the page is still there.

Dispute with Provisocol 12

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns precedence. Provisocol 12, Annex C, purports to govern the reconciliation of all seventeen Protocols and to supersede any provision inconsistent with itself. Provisocol 7 was not repealed, amended, or in any recorded sense noticed. The Office of Temporal Reconciliation maintains that Annex C governs and that Provisocol 7 survives only as a historical instrument; the Committee of Concordant Reconciliation maintains that a Protocol cannot be superseded by an annex to another Protocol without a formal Reconciliation, and that no such Reconciliation has been sealed.

Both offices cite the Provisional Indexing Guidelines, which support neither. The Aris Reconciliation is sometimes adduced as authority for the proposition that an unrepealed Protocol remains in force until it is read aloud in session; the record of readings does not extend far enough back to settle the question, and the Metronomic Pulse has been proposed as a means of dating the readings, without result.

Status

Provisocol 7 remains in force, on the general principle that nothing in the Tower has been repealed that anyone can remember repealing. It is taught to new clerks alongside Phase One: Calibration and Phase Two: Cross-Indexing, usually last, and usually with the instruction to mark the figure and not to ask where. Figures entered under it are held on Floor 44 in the eastern stacks, in ledgers bound in grey, and may be consulted by any Librarian who brings their own chair. The reading room has two.