Reconciliation Phase

The Reconciliation Phase is the formal interval during which two or more Tower records that have diverged are compelled back into a single account. It is not a fixed date but a condition: a Reconciliation Phase opens when the Bureau of Registry certifies a discrepancy as material, and closes only when the reconciled account has been sealed, countersigned, and entered in the Master Index in its current edition. Between those two acts the Tower treats the disputed subject as provisionally twice-existing, and staff are advised not to consult it.

Reconciliation Phases are distinguished from the larger scheduled audits — the Quinquennial Reconciliation of Year 419, the Integration Phase, the Consolidation Phase of Cycle 188 — by their ad hoc character. A scheduled audit reconciles everything it is told to. A Reconciliation Phase reconciles whatever has begun to disagree with itself, which is rarely what anyone expected and almost never convenient.

Opening a Phase

Any clerk of the third grade or above may petition for a Reconciliation Phase by submitting a Divergence Notice to the Bureau of Conceptual Reconciliation, which assesses the item's catalogued conceptual framework before the petition proceeds. The Notice must name both versions of the subject, their respective locations in the stacks, and the date on which they were last known to agree. Petitions lacking the third item are returned unread; the Bureau has held since the Fourth Concordance, Annex 9, that "a divergence without a prior agreement is not a divergence but a birth, and is outside our remit."

In practice most Phases are opened without any petition at all. The Sub-Bureau of Temporal Reconciliation flags them automatically when an item's recorded position disagrees with its recorded date by more than the tolerance set at the previous Reconciliation of the Seventeen Calendars, and the flag propagates upward as a Variance. Clerk Lem is notified as a matter of course, since his materialization is a precondition for the Quarterly Registry Reconciliation Schedule and the two processes share a single intake ledger.

Conduct of the Phase

Once open, a Reconciliation Phase proceeds by comparison rather than by research. The reconciling clerk lays the divergent accounts side by side and records every point at which they cannot both be true. These points are termed hard divergences. Where a divergence can be resolved by amending a date, a floor number, or a spelling, it is not a hard divergence but an errata, and is corrected without ceremony by the clerk who found it.

Hard divergences are referred upward. Since the Consolidation Phase of Cycle 188 the governing instrument has been the Principle of Immediate Contradiction, which requires that mutually exclusive catalog entries be reconciled on site rather than in the abstract — a rule that has sent clerks to Spiral 117, Aperture Beta and to worse places for reasons they were not always permitted to read. The Auditory Phase may be triggered concurrently if the backlog of unresolved divergences in the Spire exceeds the threshold set by the Acoustic Reconciliation Bureau, in which case the Phase is conducted aloud and minuted by a second clerk.

Phases are suspended, not closed, during a Stasis Quarantine; the verification of the reconciled account then falls to Phase Delta: Verdict, which is the terminal judicial and archival sub-phase of the Primary Phase and the only body competent to declare a Phase complete.

The Floor 4,112 Precedent

The most cited Reconciliation Phase in recent memory concerned the Spectral Folio of Floor 4,112, whose two accounts described the same object as occupying the same shelf and as having been removed from it in 388. The reconciling clerk, one Verrin of the Ninth Scriptorium, declined to amend either entry and instead appended a third, recording that the Folio was "present, absent, and under review." The Bureau of Conceptual Reconciliation upheld her on the ground that the Third Concordance nowhere forbids a reconciled account from being larger than both its sources.

Verrin was reprimanded separately, and not for the reconciliation. A visiting rule in force on Floor 4,112 requires that no clerk carry a light of any kind past the fourth stack; she had carried two.

Scholarly dispute

The Third Concordance and the Fourth Concordance disagree irreconcilably on when a Reconciliation Phase may be said to begin. The Third, at Annex 12, holds that the Phase opens at the moment of certification and that all work done beforehand is merely preparatory and cannot be cited. The Fourth, at Annex 2, holds the opposite: that a Phase opens when the first divergent entry was written, which may be centuries earlier, and that the certification merely acknowledges a state that already obtained.

The practical consequence is jurisdictional. Under the Third, the Bureau of Registry has no standing in a matter until it has certified it; under the Fourth, its inspectors may enter a floor, demand the relevant ledgers, and begin work the instant a clerk is careless with a date. The Office of Procedural Reconciliation has conducted inspections under the Fourth and defended them under the Third, a position set out in its memorandum of 341 and never withdrawn.

Later opinion has tended to favour the Fourth on evidentiary grounds, since a Phase that opens at certification discards exactly the period in which the divergence arose. The counter-argument, favoured in the upper spirals, is that a Phase is a proceeding and a proceeding must have a first page, "and a first page cannot be inserted retroactively into a book already bound" (Marginalia of the Sixth Recension, fol. 88v).

Inventory of a Phase

At closure a Reconciliation Phase must deposit the following in the Central Registry, without which the seal is withheld:

• the original Divergence Notice, or the automatic flag and its timestamp;
• the side-by-side comparison, initialled at each hard divergence;
• the third account, if one was made;
• the Verdict, and the countersignature of the reconciling clerk.

Phases that fail to close within the year are entered in the dormant register and may be reopened by any clerk who finds the same divergence again, which is how most of them are reopened. The register records 1,140 such reopenings in the current cycle, of which 1,138 were the same shelf.