The First Mark

The '''First Mark''' is the earliest instrument of bounded occupancy recorded in the Tower's archive, held to have been struck upon a threshold that no longer exists and to have governed, at the time of its striking, a single room. Unlike the marks administered under the Elaran Protocol, which are renewed, mirrored, and put to the moot at stated intervals, the First Mark is held to be unamendable in form and of uncertain jurisdiction in practice. It appears most often in the Tower's records as a citation — the ground upon which later marks were permitted to stand — and almost never as a live instrument.

Physical description

The mark survives in no original. It is known from forty-one recensions, of which the earliest complete copy is the bronze-rubbed impression preserved in the West Annex and catalogued under Provisional Shelf-Mark ΨU-114-K. The impression shows an irregular hexagon 11 cm across, struck rather than incised, with a single horizontal groove passing through the centre and terminating short of the eastern vertex. The groove is not to be confused with the triangular form of the Aperture Mark Gamma, though the two are frequently confused in the lower reading rooms, a confusion addressed at length in the Eleventh Concordance.

Copyists reproduce the groove at half its recorded depth. M. Voss records that this is deliberate and cites an instruction of the Third Window scriptorium: "The groove is struck to the depth at which it was struck, and no copyist shall deepen it for clarity" (Second Concordance, Annex 9, para. 2). The reason given is that the First Mark was struck into a lintel of green basalt, a material no longer quarried on any accessible floor, and that a copy deepened for legibility has, on three separate occasions, been read as a different mark entirely.

Jurisdiction and the question of the room

What the First Mark enclosed is the central dispute. The First Concordance asserts that it bounded "the first room to be entered and the last room to be left" — a formula vague enough to have generated four centuries of marginalia. The Fifth Concordance, amended in the Year of the Fractured Mirror, holds instead that the mark bounded a corridor, and that the room it is said to have governed was merely the corridor's terminus. The two Concordances have never been reconciled, and the Tower's practice is to cite whichever is nearer at hand.

"The First Mark did not make a room. It made a doorway, and the room is what the doorway has been doing ever since."

— On Perpetual Occupancy, §3

Clerk Ondrejka Pell of the Delta Wing observed in a much-quoted minute of 3 Sextilis that the question is unanswerable because the mark's threshold has not been located, and that the mark "may therefore be said to enclose everything, which is the same as enclosing nothing, which is why we stopped sending parties." The minute was stricken from the register and read into it again the following winter.

The Pell grievance and the matter of the vestibule

Between the striking of the First Mark and the institution of the Vestibule of Provisional Tenancy, a period the archive declines to measure, occupancy in the Tower was held by the First Mark alone. Provisional grade holders are today admitted only upon a Provisional Shelf-Mark, the sigil Ψ prefixed as a matter of course; but Pell argued, in a submission running to eighty-two leaves, that every provisional mark is a dependent instrument and depends ultimately on the First Mark, which has never been renewed and therefore has never lapsed.

The argument was not rebutted. It was superseded. The Seventh Concordance ruled that the First Mark "shall be treated as standing in all questions of standing and as unlocated in all questions of location," a formula that settled the matter by making it impossible to litigate. Pell's submission is retained in the archive, with the ruling pasted over its title page and the ruling itself subsequently pasted over in turn.

Comparison with later marks

The First Mark differs from the working marks of the Tower in three respects. It was not issued by an office. It bears no Neutral Tag and no Arrival Sigil, though later copyists have added both, and the additions are catalogued as additions. And it was never mirrored: the mandate of Mark, Mirror, and Moot does not reach it, since there is no second impression against which to mirror it.

Attempts to calibrate instruments against the First Mark have consistently failed. In the winter of the Year of the Long Inventory a Reconciliation Team brought a Semantic Dampener Array, Mark IV to the West Annex and reported a reading of "indeterminate but stable," a result the Ordinance-Resolver Mark VII has since been forbidden to reproduce. The Luminal Diffuser carried by the team was logged as expended, though no light is recorded as having been shed.

Access and handling

The West Annex impression is available to First Grade holders and above, on written application, between the hours of the second and sixth bells. It is permitted to handle the impression. It is not permitted to handle it while speaking.

Provisional grade holders may view the impression through the grille and may not bring a resonator of any class into the annex, following the events of 17 Elul, when Receiver Kael recorded the Forty-Ninth Thought of the Sleeper at a distance the annex plan does not admit. The Record of Emergency lists the incident without comment, and the annex has been closed on eleven subsequent occasions for reasons the register records only as "cleaning."

No party has been licensed to seek the original threshold since the Ninth Concordance withdrew the standing expedition in perpetuity. The withdrawal is reviewed every twelve years and has been upheld at every review.