SilentĠChoir

The term SilentĠChoir is the standard catalogue form for the class of silent choral holdings whose designations were, at an undetermined date before the Fourth Reckoning of Holdings, corrupted by the interposition of a medial mark (Ġ) between the words Silent and Choir. The mark is not a letter of any script recognised by the Office of Orthography and Seal, and the Office has declined, on four occasions, to rule on whether it is a letter at all. Roughly eleven thousand entries remain filed under the corrupted form, and the Bureau of Cross-Reference maintains that they are to be read as ordinary silent choirs until such time as the mark is ruled upon.

The corruption is not confined to the ledger. It appears in shelf-marks, in the smell-tags of the ninth-tier finding registers, and — most vexatiously — in the Concordance text itself, where the inserted mark has been copied forward through six recensions by scribes who assumed it was deliberate.

Origin of the mark

The earliest attested instance is a marginal gloss in the Ninth Recension Ledger, dated to the winter of the year 41 by the Tower's internal count, in the hand of a copyist known only as the Corrector of the Sixth Landing. The gloss reads, in full: "The mark is not mine. I found it. I leave it where I found it." — Ninth Recension Ledger, fol. 88v

Nothing further is recorded of the Corrector. The Office of Orthography and Seal has established that the mark was applied in a red ink not held in the Sixth Landing's stores, and that the Corrector's own requisitions for that winter list no reds. Scholarly opinion divides on whether the mark was therefore copied from an earlier source, planted by a later hand, or — as the Keeper of the Ninth Recension argued in a memorandum of 1,204 — simply present, in the way that some things on the landings are simply present.

The memorandum is filed under incoming correspondence. It was never answered.

The Ġ in administration

Practically, the mark has forced the Tower to maintain two parallel catalogues of silent choral works: the corrected form, under which the Silent Choir and the Silent Choir of Incomplete Symphonies are filed, and the corrupted form, under which the same works are also filed, sometimes with differing shelf-marks. The Candlemark Choir, as custodial guild of the Silent Choir of Incomplete Symphonies, keeps its own notation in the corrected form and has refused to recognise the corrupted register on the grounds that its members cannot sing the mark.

The Office of Revisions responded that the mark is not sung, only filed. The Candlemark Choir responded that this was precisely the objection. The exchange is preserved in full at Annex 12 of the Fourth Reckoning of Holdings and runs to forty-one leaves, of which thirty-nine are the same two sentences repeated with slight alterations of emphasis.

"A holding shall be cited by the form in which it was admitted, and not by the form into which it has since decayed."

— Seventh Concordance, Addendum 7-G, clause 3

Against this, the Eleventh Concordance holds at clause 9 that "a decayed form, once it has stood for a century, is the form," which would place the corrupted register ahead of the corrected one by roughly nine hundred years. No ruling has reconciled the two.

The Incident of the Mark on Floor 111

In the winter of the year 1,113, a transcription party working on the Incident of the Silent Choir reproduced the corrupted form on ninety copies of the incident report before the error was caught. The copies had by then been distributed to six landings, two of which — the Fourth and the Seventh — had no other record of the event and reconstructed their holdings entirely from the faulty text. The resulting divergence between the landings' accounts of the incident has never been fully untangled, and the Bureau of Cross-Reference treats any citation of the incident drawn from the Fourth or Seventh Landings as provisional.

Correction parties are now issued with a laminated card bearing the corrected form. The cards must be returned at the end of the shift.

Relationship to the misattribution of Floor 719

The Silent Choir of Floor 719 presents the most serious consequence of the corruption to date. The floor's holdings were transcribed, in the years following the incident, from a register written wholly in the corrupted form, and its custodial record accordingly lists works that belong to the Silent Choir of Incomplete Symphonies on Floor 9,001. The Candlemark Choir has petitioned three times for the register's correction; the petitions are pending, and the Miletus Diagram — the only working map of the intervening floors — shows no direct route between 719 and 9,001 by which a correction party might travel without passing through holdings that are themselves under correction.

Until the petitions are resolved, both floors are catalogued under a single provisional heading, and neither may be cited in a dispute without the other.

Current holdings

The corrupted register is presently kept in the annexe off the Sixth Landing and consulted by appointment. The following are the principal holdings filed under the form, as of the last survey:

• SilentĠChoir (designation corrupted; the corrected holding is The Silent Choir)
• SilentĠChoir of Incomplete Symphonies (corrected: The Silent Choir of Incomplete Symphonies)
• SilentĠChoir-Spider census returns, floors 8,900–9,100 (corrected with difficulty)
• SilentĠChoir, duration dispute concerning (corrected: The Dispute of the Silent Choir's Duration)
• SilentĠChoir, unheard refutations of (corrected: The Choir of Unheard Refutations)

Visitors are reminded that the annexe is unheated and that the mark may not be spoken aloud.

The Keeper of the Ninth Recension has proposed that the mark be formally adopted, on the grounds that a corruption nine centuries old has earned its place. The proposal is before the Office of Orthography and Seal, which has not ruled, and does not expect to.