Seventh Supplemental Concordance

The Seventh Supplemental Concordance is the instrument by which the category of Supplemental Concordance was formally separated from the class of ordinary amendments and given its own registry, seal, and clerical staff. Ratified on 14 Verdant, Year 623, it bears a number that has caused confusion in every generation since, as it is neither a seventh amendment to any Concordance nor a supplement to the Seventh: it is the seventh document to be admitted to the supplemental register, and the other six were later reclassified under Concordance 9, Annex Omega. The Concordance is administered by the Subcommittee for Register Integrity, a body whose membership is identical to the Subcommittee for Provisional Realities and whose minutes are filed separately anyway.

Origin and litigation

The Concordance arose from a procedural defect now known as the Cortland Dispute, after the ledger clerk who discovered it. In the winter of Year 622, a recension of the Third Concordance was submitted for filing with an annex that had travelled alongside it for forty years without ever having been formally attached. Under the principle of permanence set out in Clause 22, the annex could not be detached, and under the rule of attachment it could not be filed, and for eleven weeks it sat in the antechamber of the scriptorium on a table reserved for documents that were neither admitted nor refused. Three Librarians were appointed to resolve the matter and two of them died before reaching agreement; the survivor, Librarian Osseny, filed a minority opinion of four words, which was accepted as the majority by default.

The Concordance that emerged established that a supplemental instrument may modify a parent document without amending it, that it must be sealed with the register's own seal rather than the parent's, and that it is to be cited by ordinal and never by its parent's number. The last provision has been honoured mostly in the breach. The archive holds at least two hundred filings that cite the Supplemental Concordance as "the Seventh," prompting the Subcommittee to issue a note in Year 634 to the effect that there is no seventh of anything in this matter.

Relation to the Seventh Supplemental Accord

The Supplemental Concordance is frequently confused with the Seventh Supplemental Accord to the Concordance of Provisional Realities, though the two are distinct in origin, register, and numbering. The Accord, ratified on the same day, established the Provisional Floor and dissolved the Cataloging Bureau for Provisional Realities; the Concordance did none of these things and was not asked to. The coincidence of numbering is treated by the Subcommittee as a clerical hazard of the first order. A standing instruction, cited in Supplemental Cartographic Directives, requires that the words "Supplemental Concordance" be written out in full in any filing where the numeral 7 also appears, and that the two documents never be shelved within the same bay.

"The Accord governs realities. The Concordance governs the paperwork about realities. They are adjacent and must not be introduced."

— Supplemental Addendum to the Seventeenth Concordance, marginal note in the hand of Subcommittee secretary Avel Rook

The 649 recension and its seals

In Year 649 the Concordance was recensed into a single register volume with indices. The recension introduced the practice of the double seal: the parent document's seal on the left margin, the supplemental register's on the right, and between them a notation of the date on which the instrument was last read aloud. The notation has never been verified in any instance. Librarian Merisen observed in her survey of the register that the reading-aloud column "contains one date, repeated two hundred and six times, and a single instance of the word 'later'." The Subcommittee declined to investigate, noting that the seal itself was valid.

The recension also removed three instruments that had been entered in error, among them Supplemental Protocol Omega, which was restored to the register by the Ninety-Second Concordance, and Annex Sigma, which was never removed at all and has since been counted twice in every index. The resulting surplus of one has been carried forward in the register's tally for seventy-four years and is referred to in internal correspondence as the spare entry.

Scholarly dispute

There is no consensus on whether the Seventh Supplemental Concordance remains in force. The argument for its supersession rests on Annex Epsilon of the Sixth Concordance, which holds that a supplemental instrument lapses when its parent register is replaced in full; the 649 recension did replace the register in full, and the Concordance has not been re-ratified since. The argument against rests on the Commentaries on the Seventh Concordance, which note that the recension preserved the Concordance's seal, and that a sealed instrument cannot lapse without a formal dissolution, of which there is none on record. Librarian Osseny's own position, recorded before his death, was that the question was "not properly a question."

Practical consequence has been slight. The Subcommittee continues to invoke the Concordance in disputes over citation, and no ruling resting on it has been overturned. A proposal in Year 688 to re-ratify the instrument for clarity failed at the second reading, owing to a disagreement over whether re-ratification would reset the ordinal and thereby produce a second Seventh.

Current application

The Concordance is principally cited today for two provisions: that a supplemental instrument takes precedence over its parent only in the matter it addresses, and that an instrument's ordinal belongs to the register rather than to the document. The second provision is used chiefly to resolve numbering disputes, of which there are currently eleven open. Six of them concern the Seventh Amendment, which is not supplemental, and which the Subcommittee has asked to be left alone. Visitors wishing to consult the register volume should note that it is chained to the reading desk on Floor 311 and may not be carried to the windows.