Redaction and Reintegration

Redaction and Reintegration is the paired disposition process by which the Tower converts surplus, duplicated, or doctrinally inconvenient text into Archival Dust and, in a minority of cases, subsequently reconstitutes that dust into new reading matter. The two halves of the process are administered by different bodies on different floors and have never, in four centuries of record, agreed on what the other half is for. Redaction is conducted under the Redaction Mandate at the Gallery of Superfluous Marks on Sub-Level 14 of the West Scriptorium Spire; reintegration is conducted, where it is conducted at all, under the separate authority of Harmonic Reintegration. The two are catalogued together because the Log of Reintegration will not accept an entry that does not cite a prior redaction, and the Gallery will not close a redaction file that does not anticipate a possible reintegration. Neither office regards this as its own idea.

Procedure

Redaction proceeds by the feeding of documents to Script-Moths (Papilio obliterans), which reduce a page to dust at a rate of roughly one folio per eleven minutes. The moths are not instructed; they are released into a sealed reading room with the materials and withdrawn when the room registers as empty of legible matter. The resulting dust is weighed, sifted for binding thread and seal wax, and entered against the document's catalogue number.

Reintegration reverses the direction. Under Harmonic Reintegration, dust is re-suspended and pressed into Reconstructed Vellum, upon which the text is restored by a process the Reconstructionist Guild describes only as "resonant recall" and declines to demonstrate. Reconstructed Vellum arrives at the Returns Desk with its wrapper intact and is entered in the Log of Reintegration before it may be shelved. Guild practice requires that a reintegrated text be shelved within one shelf-width of its original position; the practical effect is that reconstituted documents are frequently returned to a floor that no longer wants them.

The grade system

Redactions are graded one through four. Grades one and two are routine and are handled by the Gallery without reference to any other body. Grade three requires the countersignature of a Librarian of the third rank. Grade four, termed terminal redaction, is reserved to the Office of Esoteric Redaction, which administers it under Directive 47-xi and reports the resulting vacancies to the Concordance directly.

The grades describe the intended outcome rather than the document's content. A grade-one redaction removes a text and expects it gone. A grade-four redaction removes a text and expects the floor to forget that it held one. The distinction matters chiefly in the paperwork: grade-four files are sealed, and the Gallery's own copies of them are destroyed at the end of each fiscal quarter by the same moths that produced them.

Dispute over authority

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns whether redaction and reintegration are one process or two. Concordance 889-A, Section 7, describes them as "a single disposition, interrupted." Directive 47-xi, drafted eleven years later, describes reintegration as "a distinct function, improperly annexed to redaction by the persistence of habit." Both documents are in force.

"That which is unmade and remade is not thereby unmade. The dust remembers the page; the page does not remember the dust. The distinction is administrative."

— Concordance 889-A, Annex 4, marginal gloss in an unidentified hand

The Office of Esoteric Redaction holds that reintegration is a courtesy extended by redaction to the record and should cease the moment the record is capable of holding its grief unassisted. The Reconstructionist Guild holds that redaction is a crude preliminary to its own work and has stated so in three separate petitions to the Concordance, the most recent in 471-AP. The Concordance has not ruled. It is generally understood that the Concordance will not rule until the question is settled by the exhaustion of one party or the other.

The Wrenfield grievance

In the winter of 458-AP, a Gallery clerk named Alder Wrenfield filed a formal objection to the reintegration of a grade-two text he had personally redacted the previous autumn. The document, a schedule of grain tithes for a floor whose number he had recorded as 2,214, was returned to him as Reconstructed Vellum bearing the same title and a wholly different set of figures. Wrenfield's objection argued that the reconstituted text was not the text he had destroyed and that the Log's practice of treating the two as a single entry constituted a false record.

The Gallery referred the matter to Doctrinal Omission, which declined jurisdiction on the grounds that the question concerned the record and not the doctrine. The Unsaid School accepted the case and returned a finding in eleven words, of which the operative clause is: "The entry records the title, not the contents." Wrenfield was reassigned to dust-weighing. His objection remains on file and is cited in every subsequent dispute over verifiability, usually by the party that lost.

Relationship to other dispositions

Redaction and Reintegration is not the Tower's only disposition process and does not claim to be. The Ordinance of Perpetual Echo governs texts that cannot be redacted because they will not be read and cannot be shelved because they will not be silent; these are handled under separate arrangement. Archival Fauna outside the Gallery — booklice, spine-borers, and the unclassified things that occupy the returns chutes — are not subject to the process, though the Gallery has twice petitioned to have the moths' jurisdiction extended to them and been refused both times.

Staff moving between the Gallery and the Reconstructionist chambers are advised to wash thoroughly between floors. The advice is printed on the stairwell notices of the West Scriptorium Spire and is not explained there either.

Current status

The process continues. The Gallery's quarterly returns for 487-AP record 14,206 redactions, of which 411 were reintegrated, of which 409 were subsequently redacted again. The two recurrences are under review. The Peripheral Ischemia Inquiry, which examined the process in 479-AP at the request of the Concordance, concluded that "the loop is not vicious, merely unclosed," and recommended no action. Its report is shelved in the Gallery, where the moths have eaten the summary page.