Somatic Clerks

Somatic Clerks are the attested order of clerical officers charged with the transcription, custody, and periodic re-attestation of somatic data drawn from Somatic Aquifers and lodged in the Somatic Codex. They are not to be confused with the Clerks of the Unblinking Eye, who maintain the aperture ledgers, nor with the Clerks of the Seventh Spiral, whose jurisdiction ends at the seventh landing. Somatic Clerks work below that line, and mostly below it by a considerable margin.

The order has no founding document. The earliest uncontested mention of it appears in the marginalia of the Somatic Codex, Register XIV, where an unnamed hand records that "three clerks of the somatic grade were admitted to the wet shelves and none complained of the damp" (Codex, Register XIV, fol. 3r). The Concordance of Wet Shelves treats this marginal note as constitutive, a position the Second Recension of the Codex disputes at length.

Functions

A Somatic Clerk's principal labour is transcription under Somatic Resonance. Data held in the Somatic Stacks that has been classified as actively resonant cannot be copied by ordinary means; the copying clerk must remain in physical contact with the record for the duration of the transcription, and the resulting copy carries the resonance forward at a measured attenuation of roughly one part in nine hundred per generation of copy. The Cartographers set the attenuation figure; the Clerks have never accepted it, and a standing grievance to that effect has been lodged with the Bureau of Annex Ψ since the winter of Y104 SCE.

Clerks also calibrate and read the Somatic Pluviometers at those aquifer sites where the instruments have been installed. Calibration records are entered in the Codex by the reading clerk's own hand, and a clerk who transcribes a pluviometer reading in another's hand is required to append a note of the substitution. The rule exists because of Clerk Amaranth Vey, who between Y96 and Y99 entered forty-one readings in a hand later shown to be her own and attributed them to a colleague who had been dead for two years. Vey was not dismissed. She was reassigned to the dry catalogue and her notes were bound into the Codex as an example, where they remain, in a hand indistinguishable from her colleague's.

Admission and the matter of the second seal

Admission to the order requires a probation of nine spirals spent under a senior clerk, during which the probationer may not speak in the stacks. Whether the probationer may write is a matter of some antiquity. The Fourth Concordance, Annex 6, holds that "the probationer's silence is of the voice and not of the pen," while the Concordance of Wet Shelves, clause 12, insists that "the probationer shall neither speak nor set down a word until the ninth spiral is turned." The two have never been reconciled. In practice probationers write, and the practice is defended by citing the Fourth, and the Fourth is cited because the practice exists.

Admission is sealed twice: once by the admitting clerk and once by the Bureau of Annex Ψ, which under Annex Ψ holds governance of the Stacks and therefore of all officers working within them. The second seal is routinely delayed. A probationer may work for years on a first seal alone, drawing no stipend but incurring full liability, a condition the Clerks of the Seventh Spiral once described in a memorandum as "unfortunate but not unprecedented." The memorandum is filed; nothing followed from it.

Relationship to the Cartographers

Somatic Cartography classifies and registers aquifers; the Somatic Clerks transcribe what the Cartographers have registered. The division is clean in principle and contested in fact, since a clerk who transcribes a resonant aquifer necessarily re-describes it, and the Cartographers regard any re-description as an unauthorised survey. The dispute reached its sharpest point in Y101 SCE, when a clerk at the Fourth Aperture entered a correction to a Cartographer's classification of a minor Fungal Reservoir and was met with a formal objection running to sixty pages. The objection was upheld on procedural grounds; the correction stands in the Codex unaltered, because no one has been able to locate the page on which it would be reversed.

"The clerk transcribes; the cartographer delimits. Where the transcription alters the delimitation, the delimitation is prior. Where the delimitation is shown false by the transcription, the transcription is prior. Both clauses are in force."

— Concordance of Wet Shelves, clauses 4 and 5

Conditions of work in the Stacks

Somatic Clerks are assigned to the Somatic Stacks by rotation, in shifts of eleven hours, and are issued one lamp, one stool, and a ledger of blank leaves in the somatic grade. The stools are not to be removed from the shelf-aisle to which they are assigned. This prohibition is repeated in the standing orders, in the Codex front matter, and on a small brass plate affixed to the third landing, which suggests it has been tested more than once.

Prolonged contact with resonant material produces in some clerks a persistent awareness of the aquifer's depth, reported variously as a pressure behind the eyes or as the sense of standing at the lip of a well. The condition is catalogued, not treated, and is recorded in the Codex under the heading of occupational attestation. Clerks who report it are moved to the dry catalogue for one spiral and returned. The order does not regard the condition as an injury and has resisted every attempt to have it so classified, chiefly on the ground that a clerk who cannot feel the depth cannot be trusted to transcribe it.

Numbers and disposition

The order does not publish its membership. The Roll of Somatic Clerks is kept at Floor 714., three spirals above the Stacks, and is consulted only by the Bureau of Annex Ψ. Requests for the roll's total are answered with the figure for the preceding year, which is always the same figure, and which the Bureau has declined to explain. The figure is 311.

Clerks serve until the ninth spiral of their sixtieth year, at which point they are retired to the dry catalogue and their ledgers are bound. Their names remain on the roll. The order holds that a clerk's resonance does not cease at retirement but only quietens, and that a retired clerk may still be consulted on matters within their former shelf-aisle, provided the consultation takes place in writing and the writing is witnessed.