Registry of Vertical Transit

The Registry of Vertical Transit is the standing roll of persons, instruments, and conveyances entitled to move between the numbered floors of the Tower under recorded authority. It is not the record of movement itself — that is the Annals of Vertical Transit — but the record of who and what may be entered in it. The distinction has been litigated, quietly, for a very long time.

The Registry is held in nineteen bound volumes and one loose gathering at the Vertical Registry annex on the floor designated D-441, known to its staff as the Ribbed Landing. Entries are made in iron-gall ink by two clerks working in alternation, neither of whom may read the other's page until the volume is closed. This is not superstition; it is Fourth Concordance, Annex 9.

Origin and the Great Discrepancy

The Registry was instituted eleven years after the Great Discrepancy by the Office of Vertical Registry, an office that had until then supplied floor designations to the Registry of Vertical Claims and wished for a second function. The enabling clause is brief and has been read two ways ever since: the Registry was to record "all vertical movement bearing a manifest," and the Department of Vertical Transit has argued without interruption that this means all movement recorded in the Transit Manifest, while the Office of Vertical Registry maintains it means only movement bearing one at the moment of registration, which is a different and much smaller set.

The practical result is that the Registry records roughly one movement in forty. The Transit Gendarmerie has twice requested a reconciled count and twice been told that no reconciled count exists to give.

Relation to the Department of Vertical Transit

The Registry does not issue manifest slips and has no authority over the Vertical Transit Network. It receives notices. Under the triplicate scheme governing Transit Manifests, the second copy — the one returned to the Custodians of the Vertical — is in turn copied to the Registry, where it is entered in the volume current at the time of receipt rather than the volume current at the time of transit. A journey in late autumn is therefore commonly entered in the following spring. The Registry regards this as correct, because the Registry records receipts.

Disputes over the Index of Permissible Vertical Motions occasionally reach the Registry by misdirection, and are returned unopened with a slip reading "Motion is not registry." The slip is printed; the wording is fixed.

Famous entries and refused entries

Entry 4,112 records the registration of the Primary Axiomatic Transit Line as a single conveyance, a classification the Vertical Tram Lines have never accepted. Entry 8,003 records the clerk Wynne, registered retrospectively for a descent she did not make, on the grounds that the descent had been entered in the Annals and the Registry could not be left in a state of discrepancy with a document it does not administer.

Refusals are recorded in the loose gathering, which is not numbered. Refusal 27 concerns a Provisional Transit Aperture that registered itself by inserting a slip through the binding; the slip was removed and the aperture was not entered. Refusal 31 was issued against the Registry of Parcels, which had begun entering parcels as persons on the argument that a parcel arriving at a floor had, in a sense, travelled. The Registry's reply is often quoted in the scriptoria:

"Travelling in a sense is not travelling. The Registry has no column for senses."

— Refusal 31, marginal note, Office of Vertical Registry

Dispute concerning the number of volumes

Scholars do not agree on whether there are nineteen volumes or twenty. The Second Concordance on Registry Practice states that the volumes are "nineteen in number, the twentieth being reserved," which the Office of Vertical Registry reads as confirming nineteen, and the Compendium of Registry Precedent reads as confirming twenty. A third position, advanced by the archivist Wynne of the Ribbed Landing in her marginalia, holds that the reserved volume has been in use since 4 R.C. and that the Concordance describes an intention, not a shelf.

The shelf supports nineteen. Staff have been instructed not to raise this.

Access and consultation

Consultation of the Registry is open to any holder of a valid Transit Manifest and to members of the Custodians of the Vertical on production of their seal. Visitors are asked to leave the reading room by the lower door, as the upper door is load-bearing. Volumes may be consulted one at a time; the loose gathering may not be consulted at all, and is produced only when a refusal is formally appealed, which has happened four times.

The Registry is audited each triennium alongside the Annals of Vertical Transit and, by long custom, on the same day, so that the two audits may disagree in the same room.