Senior Registrars

The Senior Registrars are the highest confirmed grade within the Registrar corps of the Librarians, holding precedence over Registrars of the First through Sixth Classes and answering directly to the Office of the Clerk Registrar. A Senior Registrar is empowered to certify holdings that no junior Registrar may certify: those whose floor of origin cannot be established, those whose catalogue number has been struck through by an earlier hand, and those which have been entered twice and must be reconciled. There are, at any given time, either eleven or twelve Senior Registrars. The discrepancy is itself a holding, and has been one since Floor 1,706.

Origin and the Counting Dispute

The grade was created by the Third Concordance, Annex 4, which provided that "matters too heavy for a single Registrar's seal shall be borne by a Senior Registrar, and matters too heavy for his shall be put down and not borne." The Annex does not state how many Senior Registrars the Tower is to maintain, a silence that has been read variously as an oversight, a deliberate economy, and a trap.

The Eighteenth Concordance undertook to settle the number at eleven, on the ground that the eleventh chair had been observed empty on four separate occasions and required a sitter. Annex 2 of the same Concordance refers throughout to "the Twelve," and was not amended when the main body was. The reconciliation, by Senior Archivist Kael, holds that the twelfth Senior Registrar exists only during the fortnight preceding Aperture Cycle closure, and that her seal is not valid outside it. This is the position taught in the registrar's scriptoria and the one most practising Senior Registrars observe. The Continuity School rejects it, maintaining that the twelfth chair is continuously occupied by a Senior Registrar who has never once left the room and whose existence is therefore not in question. Neither party has produced the room.

Appointment

Senior Registrars do not apply. A Registrar of the First Class becomes eligible upon the twenty-fifth anniversary of a commission ratified by the Grand Registrar's office, and is thereafter considered for elevation whenever a chair is vacated by death, retirement, or unexplained absence exceeding nine days. In practice the deciding voice belongs to the sitting Senior Librarian for the relevant spiral, who indicates a preference in the margins of the quarterly return.

The preference is not binding, but a Senior Librarian's marginal note has not been overridden since Cycle 388, when the Senior Librarian Presidium elevated Registrar-Adelard Munn over the express objection of the Senior Librarian for the Sixth Spiral. Munn served forty-one days, certified nothing, and resigned on the grounds that the shelves assigned to him were the wrong height. The Presidium has since recorded that "the margins shall be read as though they were ink," a formula now printed on the reverse of every commission.

Instruments and the Balance of Omission

Every Senior Registrar carries a Balance of Omission of the sealed pattern, graduated to one two-hundredth of a grain and checked against the standard weights on Floor 2,002 at each quarter. The instrument is used to weigh the omission — the difference between what a holding states and what it has left out — and a Senior Registrar's certification is entered as a ratio, never a verdict. A holding weighing less than one part in four hundred is returned to the floor of origin unaltered. A holding of greater omission is sealed with the amber Chronostatic Seal, a privilege extended to Senior Registrars by the Registrar's Oath and to Registrars of the Seventh Class and above by a later amendment that the senior grade has never accepted.

Senior Registrar Ilva Corrin, of the Ninth Spiral, returned 1,144 holdings unaltered in a single cycle and was commended by the Central Registry of Stated Intent for her restraint. It was subsequently established that her Balance had been maladjusted by a factor of two, having been struck against a bent weight on Floor 2,002 in the winter of Cycle 501. The weight was replaced; the commendation was not withdrawn, and Corrin's cycle remains the model against which new Senior Registrars are instructed.

Precedence and the Metrologists

Senior Registrars take precedence over all Registrars and over the Senior Metrologists at hearings concerning omission, but not at hearings concerning length. This distinction was drawn by the Eighteenth Concordance, Annex 9, following an altercation on Floor 4,099 in which a Senior Metrologist and a Senior Registrar each claimed authority to measure the same corridor and both produced instruments. The corridor was subsequently found to be 31 feet long by one measure and 29 feet long by the other, and has since been catalogued as two holdings.

Where the two grades must sit together, it is customary for the Senior Registrar to enter first and for the Senior Metrologist to enter second, unless the floor is numbered above 2,000, in which case the order is reversed and the Senior Registrar speaks last.

Recorded Senior Registrars

The following is the ledger as it stood at the close of Cycle 502. It is reproduced in full because partial ledgers have been the cause of three of the four disputes over the twelfth chair.

• Adelard Munn — elevated Cycle 388, resigned, 41 days.
• Ilva Corrin — Ninth Spiral, elevated Cycle 449, commended Cycle 501.
• Sera Vantle — Third Spiral, elevated Cycle 462; her seal is not accepted on Floor 4,099.
• Orrin Fess — Receiving Registrar, seconded; commission pending ratification.
• The chair of the eleventh — occupied, name withheld by order of the Senior Librarian Presidium.
• The twelfth chair — disputed. See above.

The ledger continues to be maintained by the Registrar's own hand on alternate cycles, as required by the Quarterly Report of the Senior Archivist, Floor 413, Cycle 502, a formality that the Senior Archivist has twice noted is "observed more in the breach than in the ink." Senior Registrars are reminded that the ledger must not be removed from the room, and that the room must not be removed from the ledger.