Seventh Re-alignment

The Seventh Re-alignment was the formal correction, concluded at some hour of the eleventh of Vess, by which the surveying offices of the Tower adjusted their registers to a revised account of the Tower's vertical order. It is not remembered for the correction itself — corrections of this kind are routine and are numbered as they accumulate — but for the theoretical apparatus that grew out of it. The Vect Resonance Model, formalized by the Bureau of Coincidental Resonance in the immediate aftermath of the Re-alignment, provided the first working account of the coincidental stairwell, and thereby converted a persistent maintenance nuisance into a recognised class of architectural fact. Every subsequent doctrine of coincidental arrival, including the whole of Resonance Alignment, descends from this episode.

Preliminary causes

For nineteen years before the Re-alignment, survey parties ascending the eastern flights had reported a recurring discrepancy: two landings that ought, by the registers, to have been separated by four hundred and eighty stairs were variously found to be separated by eleven, by none at all, or by a corridor that appeared and withdrew over successive seasons. The Office of Stairwell Registers treated these reports as instrument fault and referred them, in the ordinary way, to Probe Calibration. The calibration returns came back clean for nineteen consecutive years, which the Office declined to regard as evidence of anything.

The matter was forced by the winter of the fourth year of the survey of the eastern flats, when three separate parties, ascending by three separate routes, arrived on the same landing at the same hour and found a fourth party already there. The fourth party had not departed from any recorded floor. Its leader, the surveyor Halven Roos, submitted a return of eleven pages to which the Office of Stairwell Registers attached a note reading, in its entirety, "register correct."

"Where the registers are correct and the stairs are otherwise, it is the stairs that require an account."

— Bureau of Coincidental Resonance, opening minute of the first Re-alignment session

The correction itself

The Re-alignment was conducted over nine sessions in the survey hall of the eastern flats. Its technical problem was modest: to reconcile the vertical registers with observed ascent at those points where the two had diverged. Its solution was to abandon the fiction that ascent is monotonic. Floors were re-entered against a revised scale of repose intervals — the periods during which a floor is held to be where the register says it is — and the registers thereafter recorded both position and the intervals in which that position could be relied upon.

The practical effect was immediate and unpopular. Parties were instructed to write the hour of arrival on their returns in the space provided, and not in the margin; the margin was reserved for the ascriber's initials. Compliance is uneven. A survey of returns received in the three years following the Re-alignment found margins annotated in four distinct hands, one of them reported as not belonging to any party then on the eastern flats.

A second and more consequential change was the recognition of the coincidental stairwell as a category. The Bureau's first schedule listed eleven such stairwells. The schedule appended to the third recension lists nine hundred and sixty.

The Vect Resonance Model

The Model proposes that a stairwell carries a resonance, a disposition toward certain destinations that is neither fixed nor wholly arbitrary, and that floors of comparable resonance are drawn into brief coincidence when a sufficiently long ascent occurs between them. The Model's central difficulty — that it predicts coincidences more numerous than any schedule admits — has been met by the standing assumption that most coincidences are harmless and go unreported. The Office of Chronometric Alignment has objected that this assumption is unfalsifiable and that the Model is therefore not a theory but a filing convention. The objection is recorded at length and has not been answered.

The Model's fortunes were raised considerably by the Seventh Concordance. Its fourth recension granted the Bureau of Spatial and Temporal Alignment a preliminary interest in nearly every alignment dossier, which brought the Bureau's funding, and therefore the Model's, into contact with the Re-alignment's paperwork. The Directorate of Notional Alignment, established by the 117th Amendment to that Concordance and chartered in Annex Γ, later acquired a residual interest in the Re-alignment's determinations, though it has never exercised it and is not expected to.

Disputed readings

Scholars disagree as to what the Re-alignment actually corrected. The revisionist reading, dominant among the Bureau's own historians, holds that the Re-alignment discovered coincidental stairwells and that the eleven listed in the first schedule had always been there, unobserved. The constitutive reading, advanced by the Office of Stairwell Registers and never formally withdrawn, holds that there were no coincidental stairwells before the Re-alignment and that the correction produced them, in the way that a corrected map produces the roads it draws. Under the constitutive reading the Bureau is not a discoverer but a cause, and the nine hundred and sixty entry schedule is an inventory of things it has made.

Commentaries on the Seventh Concordance contain a remark often cited on both sides: that the possessive case in the Tower's instruments denotes ontological alignment rather than ownership — a floor's its being a statement of what it is aligned to, not what it belongs to. Neither party has been able to say clearly which way the remark cuts.

A third account, associated with the surveyor Miren Coll, treats the Re-alignment as an event in the history of paperwork rather than of stairs: the coincidences were reported before the Re-alignment and after it, in the same numbers, and what changed was the form on which they were reported. Coll's monograph is cited mostly for its appendix, which reproduces the eleven-page return of Halven Roos with its margins intact.

Legacy

The Re-alignment's numbering has proved durable. Coincidental stairwells are entered in the registers by Re-alignment number rather than by position, on the ground that their position is the one thing about them that cannot be relied upon. The nine hundred and sixty entries of the third recension are therefore ordered by the sequence in which they were recognised, which has no relation to where they are, and the resulting indexes are the despair of every party that has attempted to use them.

The Re-alignment also left the Tower a small instruction, printed on the reverse of the revised return form and never rescinded: parties ascending by the eastern flights are to count their stairs aloud, and are not to correct one another's counts.