Recitation of Chronometric Baseline

The Recitation of Chronometric Baseline is the formal, verbatim reading aloud of a recorded baseline value during the establishment, maintenance or suspension of a Chronometric Well. It is distinguished from ordinary Procedural Recitation by its object: where Procedural Recitation recites the text of a requirement, the Recitation of Chronometric Baseline recites a number, and recites it in the presence of the instrument that produced it. The reading is accomplished by a sanctioned Recitation Clerk, witnessed by a representative of the Office of Chronometric Standards, and entered into the Chronometric Audit Annex within one hour of the sounding of the final digit.

Because the baseline of a Well is a number that no one may write down until it has been spoken, the Recitation is held by the Chronometric Synod to be prior to the record and not merely prior to its filing. A baseline recited incorrectly is not corrected; it is silenced.

Origin and standing

The practice derives from the Third Concordance, Annex 9, which establishes that "a value unheard is a value unheld," and assigns the recitation to the office nearest the aperture at the time of the sounding. The Synod's own gloss of that clause, issued in the seventh recension of the Chronometric Tick, adds that the recital must be audible at the far wall of the chamber, and that a Recitation Clerk who is unable to be heard is to be replaced without ceremony. This gloss has been read at every licensing since.

The Recitation was originally a single act of some eleven words. It has grown. Under the current schedule it runs to forty minutes at full attention, with the number itself occupying between one and three seconds near the middle and the remainder given over to the names of the attending office, the aperture designation, the ambient reading of the Pulse Floor, and the standard statement of transcription. The Synod has declined three times to shorten it, on the ground that the middle of the recitation is disorienting if reached too soon.

Procedure

The Recitation Clerk stands with the left heel against the copper line at the chamber's western wall, opens the register of sanctioned texts at the page of the day's entry, and reads the preparatory matter at a pace of sixty words per minute. The Clerk of Eternal Recitation maintains the register and is reported to check the page markers at the turn of each hour and at the sounding of the aperture.

The baseline itself is recited once, and once only. The rule admits a single exception: where the Recitation Clerk is interrupted by the well's own sounding, the Recitation is voided from the point of interruption and the entire act is repeated by a different clerk, drawn from the relief list and sworn at the door. A 944-floor dispute arose in the winter of 91 when two clerks each claimed to have recited the value first; the Auditor of the Eastern Stack ruled that the auditor's own clerk—not the second clerk—determined the order, and the relief roster was amended to certify who swears first.

Where the baseline is being formally declared under Baseline Establishment rather than merely maintained, the Recitation precedes the Declaration and is held to constitute the sound of the number prior to its inscription. The Synod's guidance, which is short, states that the Declaration fixes the number, the Recitation makes it audible, and the two are not interchangeable; an error at any point, of course, does not nullify the baseline, because the baseline is fixed by the Declaration, not by the recitation.

Dispute over the silent reading

The principal dispute in the field concerns whether the Recitation may be performed inaudibly. The Office of Chronometric Standards holds that unless the value has been heard by the full complement of attending officers, it has not been recited at all, and cites the Standard Chronometric Index for the proposition that the ear's measure is the only register of duration. Against this, the Spectroscopy of the Official Register and its more recent partisans argue that a Recitation conducted in the marked silence of the lower chamber is no less binding, since the clerks themselves report the number as recited, and the office's own inspection has routinely admitted such entries.

The Auditor of the Eastern Stack once ruled that a silent recitation was invalid, and then that the ruling was itself invalid, having been spoken. This paradox has been the whole of the dispute for years.