Registrar of Ephemeral Dispensations

The Registrar of Ephemeral Dispensations is the office responsible for granting, recording, and — in rare and heavily witnessed circumstances — revoking permissions that attach to things that do not persist. The holder is not the same as the Registrar of Provisionals, though the two are confused in nearly every third inquiry received at the Office of Ephemeral Affairs. The distinction is old and is set out in the margin of Concordance XI: the Registrar of Provisionals classifies ephemeral notions as they arrive, whereas the Registrar of Ephemeral Dispensations governs what may be done with a category once it has been classified and then lost. The present holder is Aris Thorne, who assumed the office as an Undersecretary and has held it without interruption since.

Origin and mandate

The office is descended from the short-lived Stewardship of Vanished Permits, established after the withdrawal of Concordance IV and re-established as a registrarship under Concordance IX, Clause 12. That clause is the only clause of the Ninth whose beginning and end are agreed upon by all recensions; the middle is disputed (see below). Its mandate is deceptively narrow: a dispensation is ephemeral if the object, condition, or permission it concerns ceases to exist before the dispensation's own term expires. In practice this covers most of the Tower's administrative life, since the Tower issues permissions faster than it preserves the things they concern.

Applications arrive on Spiral 40, where the Registrar of Ephemera maintains the intake desk shared with proposals for new entries to the Table of Ephemeral Minerals. Applicants are advised to arrive before the twelfth bell; the intake desk closes to new petitions at the twelfth bell and does not reopen for petitions already in the corridor.

Procedure and the Veil Form

A dispensation is granted on a Veil Form, a single sheet of very thin stock on which the permission is written in ink that fades at a rate proportional to the term of the underlying ephemeral. A permit for a condition lasting nine days is legible for nine days. Longer terms require re-inking, and terms exceeding a season require the form to be read aloud by two witnesses into the record of the Ephemeral Audits, a practice officers call "sounding the veil." The form itself is retained; the permission is not, and the Registrar's seal indicates only that the permission once existed.

Holders of the office are cautioned against dispensing to oneself. Clause 41 of the Office's standing instruction records that Registrar Quietus, before standardizing the text of the Registrar's Oath, granted himself eleven successive dispensations for the same lapsed condition, each citing the one before; the chain ran out on the twelfth, and the resulting audit occupies four shelves in the annex. Quietus was not censured, but the Oath he later standardized now includes a line about self-dispensation that is, by consensus, the longest in the document.

Relationship with other registrars

The office works alongside the Registrar Corps, from which its holders are traditionally drawn, and defers to the Grand Registrar on questions of term and form. It corresponds with the Clerk Registrar whenever a dispensation requires entry in the Ledger of Ephemeral Appointments, and with the Clerk-Registrar of Linear Standards when a faded Veil Form no longer meets the standard required for filing. On the granting of dispensations concerning probes and instruments, it does not act alone: the Material Retention Amp Disposition holds the permanent dispensations for the VII-Amp, and the Office of Unbroken Sequence issues its own written dispensations to omit links from the White Noise Absorption Chain, which are never entered in the Veil register. The office maintains a policy of not reading the Chain dispensations at all, on the grounds that one does not verify what one is not asked to verify.

Dispute: the clause of two readings

Scholars of the registrarship divide over Clause 12 of the Ninth Concordance. One reading holds that an ephemeral dispensation lapses automatically with its subject, requiring no act of the Registrar; the other holds that it merely becomes voidable, and that the Registrar must formally void it, a step that may be taken only if the Registrar can still describe the subject, which in most cases cannot be done. The first reading has the advantage of simplicity; the second has the advantage of keeping the office in work. The Bureau of Concordant Citation has been asked to resolve the matter four times and has each time returned the question with the note that both readings are concordant. Registrar Maelstrom is reported to favour the first and to have said so in an annex that has since been withdrawn.

Records

Registrations of dispensations are held in the Veil register, an open ledger that is periodically rebound because the faded permissions, though no longer readable, continue to occupy space. Withdrawn entries are struck through and retained, and the office keeps the struck pages in a separate binding that is itself periodically rebound for the same reason. Since the rebinding of the register in the winter of the year counted 1,102, no officer has been able to reconstruct the order of the entries before the eighth folio, and it is no longer attempted.

"A dispensation that cannot be produced is not thereby unfounded. It is simply, as of this writing, elsewhere."

— Aris Thorne, marginal note to the Veil register, folio 8