Second Concordance, Annex D, Clause 12

Second Concordance, Annex D, Clause 12 is the twelfth clause of Annex D to the Second Concordance, and the only clause of that annex to have been amended by the annex it belongs to. It establishes the office of Standing Recorder of Annex D and fixes the conditions under which a record may be said to have "settled" — that is, to have ceased changing between readings. Clause 12 is eleven lines long and has generated, by the count of the Office of Annex Reconciliation, some four hundred folios of commentary. It is among the most cited clauses in the Tower and among the least obeyed.

Text and structure

The operative sentence of Clause 12 reads, in the recension held in the Primary Stacks, as follows:

"A record shall be deemed settled when three consecutive readings agree, the readings to be taken by different hands, on different days, and not at the prompting of any party with an interest in the settling."

— Second Concordance, Annex D, Clause 12

The clause is silent on what constitutes a day, a hand, or an interest. These silences are not accidental; the Drafting Commission of the Second Concordance recorded in its minutes for the 8th of Month of Slow Ledgers, Year 312 of the Present Recension, that the omissions were "deliberate and to be left alone." They have not been left alone.

The Standing Recorder

Clause 12 created the office of Standing Recorder of Annex D, whose incumbent is required to keep a running register of all records currently unsettled, together with the number of readings each has attracted. The register is posted continuously under Second Concordance, Annex D, Clause 14, which mandates the perpetual posting of the Notice of Accessions and, by extension, the Recorder's unsettled list appended beneath it. The thirty-first Standing Recorder, Ovren Masch, held the office for forty-one years and never once certified a record as settled, on the grounds that "a record which has been read three times is thereafter read differently." Masch's successor, Halvet Dree, reversed the practice in her first week and settled two hundred and six records in a single afternoon; the resulting dispute is still before the Committee on Annex D.

The question of the third hand

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns whether the three readings required by Clause 12 must be performed by three distinct persons or may be performed by one person on three occasions. The Literalist Reading holds that "different hands" names physical hands — three readers, three sets of fingers. The Substantialist Reading holds that the phrase names difference of judgment, which a single reader may supply across time. The Second Concordance, Annex 7-γ, clause 15 is sometimes adduced in support of the Substantialist position, since it permits guild consolidation upon demonstration of 'irreducible operational entanglement', a phrase the Substantialists read as endorsing the accumulation of roles in one office. The Thirty-Second Concordance, Annex 7, Clause 2 settles only that where a Protocol and a Concordance disagree, the Concordance prevails; it says nothing about hands, and both readings cite it.

The practical consequence is considerable. On the Literalist Reading the Tower's reading-room rosters are drawn up by the Office of Three Hands, which maintains a pool of readers certified not to know one another. Under that office's Ordinance 4, readers assigned to the same record are housed on separate floors for the duration of the readings.

Incidents

In the winter of Year 447, the Recorder's register recorded a single unsettled entry — a bill of lading for eleven crates of lamp oil — which was read on nine hundred and four occasions over a period of six months without settling. The Inquiry into the Oil Lading found that all nine hundred and four readings had been taken by the same clerk, Perrin Osst, who had not understood the requirement of different hands and had believed the clause to be concerned with the neatness of the script. The inquiry declined to censure Osst and instead amended the register's prologue to clarify the matter. The prologue now runs to nineteen pages. Osst was subsequently appointed to draft the clarification.

A separate incident, the Affair of the Disagreeing Copyists, arose when three certified readers returned readings of the same accession that agreed in every particular except the date of accession, which each had copied from a different copy of the source. The Committee on Annex D held that agreement of copies is not agreement of records and left the accession unsettled. It remains unsettled. It is the oldest entry on the register.

Relation to transcription

Clause 12 is frequently confused with Clause 17, Annex D of the same Concordance, which defines records suitable for Autoquill transcription. The distinction is one of purpose: Clause 12 governs whether a record may be relied upon, Clause 17 whether it may be copied by machine. A record may be settled and yet untranscribable, or transcribable and permanently unsettled; the register carries both notations, in different inks, and the Transcription Cycle defined in Clause 22, Annex C of the Second Concordance does not resolve the overlap. The Standing Recorder of Annex D has requested clarification from the Librarians on four occasions. No clarification has been issued, which the Committee on Annex D has ruled is itself a clarification.

Current status

As of the most recent posting, the unsettled register comprises twelve thousand and nine entries, of which one — the accession of Year 447 — predates the tenure of every living Recorder. The office maintains that Clause 12 is working as intended. Critics point to the eleven lines, the four hundred folios, and the fact that no one has ever read the clause three times and agreed with themselves. The Recorder's standard reply, recorded in the Notice and repeated at each posting, is that the clause asks for different hands and not for a different clause.