The Lacrimal Concordance (Administrative Floor 44)

The Lacrimal Concordance is the certified holding copy of the Lacrimal Concordance maintained at Administrative Floor 44, the depository for certified copies of the Concordance of Petitions. It is the only copy of the document held at a certified-petition address; all other recensions are held either at the Forty-Seventh Floor or in loose-leaf form at Floor 1212. Like other Self-Irrigating Tomes, the Floor 44 copy exudes a clear saline fluid when clauses touching archival remorse or procedural failure are read aloud. It is the only certified copy at Floor 44, and its fluid has been sampled continuously since the third year of the quarantine of Floor 770.

The copy is bound in grey board over a sewn spine of seven quires, and its pages bear the running stamp of the Petitions Registry in the margin of every verso. It is not lent. The 44 copy may be consulted only in the presence of a Petition Clerk, and only between the hours of the first and sixth bell.

Description

Physical description follows the register entry made at binding. The tome measures 31 by 24 centimetres, weighs 2.9 kilograms dry, and holds four hundred and twelve leaves. Under Floor 44's climate rules it is kept at 14 degrees and 45 per cent relative humidity, conditions specified for petition materials rather than lacrimal ones — a discrepancy the Office of Moisture has twice declined to resolve.

The irrigation is deliberate rather than incidental. When the reader reaches Clause 9 or any of its successors, the binding exudes fluid at the joints, and the fluid is collected in a shallow tray recessed into the reading desk. The tray is drained after each consultation and its contents decanted into a stoppered vial, which is numbered, sealed, and deposited in the floor's fluid archive. The archive now holds some eleven thousand vials, arranged by date of consultation rather than by clause, a decision the Bureau of Standing Records has questioned in writing on four occasions and never overturned.

"The fluid is to be received, not mopped; the receptacle is part of the instrument."

— Concordance of Petitions, Annex 6, clause 4

Reading order

The Floor 44 copy was rebound in the sixteenth year of the present registry and the quires were sewn out of sequence. The reading order prescribed for consultation is therefore: Quires 1 through 5 in order, then Quire 6, which contains Clauses 7 through 13, then Quire 5 again, being the clause on procedures for the correction of earlier clauses. Petitioners unfamiliar with the arrangement sometimes read straight through and find that the middle of the document has been dealt with before the beginning.

A small notice on the desk ledge, painted by hand and since varnished over, reads: Do not turn the leaves with the thumb.

Dispute over the vials

The School of Latent Structure holds that the collected fluid is evidentiary and argues from the Lacrimal Ducts of Second Thought that each vial is a record of a specific act of reconsideration, and should be indexed to the clause that provoked it. The School of Applied Paradox replies that the fluid is an allegorical by-product of memo revision and that the vials are best regarded as stationery. This dispute is now in its ninth decade and has generated an annex of its own, Annex 11, which has never been read aloud in either school's hearing.

In the ninth winter of the dispute the Office of Moisture ruled that the vials must be stored on their sides, on the ground that an upright vial "gives the appearance of intending to be opened." The ruling was appealed by the Petitions Registry and upheld. Every vial in the archive is on its side.

Comparison with other recensions

Readers frequently ask how the Floor 44 copy differs from the loose-leaf pages on Floor 1212. The Palimpsest pages are overwritten and semi-legible; the Floor 44 copy is a clean recension and was certified as such. Discrepancies remain, however. The Palimpsest preserves a version of Clause 8 in which the phrase "the reader's own account" appears where the Floor 44 copy has "the account of the reader's office." The Petitions Registry has taken the view that the two are the same clause differently worded. The School of Applied Paradox has taken the view that they are two clauses and that one of them is missing from every copy bound after the rebinding.

Against the central recension at the Forty-Seventh Floor, the Floor 44 copy shows one substantive divergence: the central text assigns Clauses 14 through 17 to Floor 208 by way of Concordance 88, Clause 12, which describes that floor as transitional between 207 and Floor 317. The Floor 44 copy does not carry the assignment. A note in the hand of the Registrar's clerk, Hessa of the Seventh Quire, records the omission as "considered and allowed," without stating by whom.

Incidents

In the fourth year of the present registry the desk tray overflowed during a reading by Orvin Sedge, a petitioner from Floor 811, who was reading Clause 9 aloud in connection with a failed petition of his own. The fluid ran under the desk and damaged thirty-one vials in the lower archive. Sedge was not disciplined. The Petitions Registry instead amended its consultation rules to require that no petitioner read Clause 9 aloud twice on the same day, a rule Sedge is said to have observed thereafter.

The vials affected in the incident were renumbered rather than discarded, and the renumbering slip is pasted into the front pastedown of the tome itself, where it remains visible to every reader who opens the board.

Access

Access is granted by written petition to the Petitions Registry and is refused to any petitioner whose own file is under review. Readers are asked to leave the tray dry and to return the stopper to the vial before writing their names in the consultation book.