The Original 42

The Original 42 is a numeral artifact of the Second Recension, held in the North Reading Room of the Vault of Original Instruments on Sub-level Sigma-41, one level above the Vellum shelf. It is the only numeral in the Tower's holdings that has been authenticated as an Original rather than as a certified copy, and it is accordingly the standard against which all other uses of the number forty-two are checked. The artifact does not represent forty-two. It is forty-two, in the sense that the Treasury seals of the Ninth Concordance recognize for objects of singular class, and the Office of Weights has never permitted it to be weighed.

Description and custody

The Original 42 is a shallow bronze plate measuring 41.8 cm by 13.2 cm, cast with a single raised figure, and mounted in a hawthorn case lined with red serge. The serge has been replaced twice, in 9 and 27 of the present recension; the case itself is original and is not inspected, as a rule, by anyone. The numeral is verified at the opening of each Convocation by the Keeper of the North Reading Room, who reads it aloud, and by the Under-Secretary for Numerals, who reads it aloud again, and by the Archivist of the Small Registers, who does not read it aloud but is required to be present. The three readings are compared. Where they disagree, the artifact is considered to have the right of way.

Visitors are admitted to the artifact on Tuesdays and the second Thursday of each month, in parties of no more than nine. The plate is not to be polished.

Origin and the Second Recension

The artifact enters the record during the Second Recension, in the inventory of the Chapter of the Counting Floor, which lists it as "one numeral, forty-two, original, worn at the arm" and appends no further remark. The phrase "worn at the arm" has been disputed for four hundred years, and the most durable reading — advanced by the Locksmiths' party in their counter-petition of the following winter — holds that the plate was once mounted on a door or a turning-rail and was removed for its own preservation after the arm itself was decommissioned. The Chapter has never confirmed this. It has also never denied it, and the denial is printed in the same recension as the original entry, three lines lower, in the same hand.

At the time of its filing the number forty-two had been disputed across at least eleven floor-inventories, each maintaining its own count of the number and none of them agreeing on whether it could be used twice in a single document. The Original settled the question by being a physical object, and for this reason the secondary literature often speaks of the numeral as having been "founded" rather than "cast." The Primacy of the Original Artifact treats the 42 as a test case: it is not derived from anything, and its authority is a consequence of this. The author of the Primacy records that a numeral "cannot be copied from a copy and retain the standing of the original, unless the copy is itself held by the Directorate of Descent, which is a separate office." The distinction is not challenged in the surviving annotations.

Controversy: the confusion with forty-two

The principal scholarly dispute around the Original 42 is not over its authenticity but over how many times it may be applied. The Third Concordance at Annex 6 provides that the Original is "the forty-two of all documents, and shall be preferred where the count is challenged." The Vellum Original of the Third Concordance at the same annex adds a rider — the usual story is that the ruler of the Vellum recension was inserted by a clerk who had been asked to rule a line under the clause and, when he had finished, removed the pen, so that the rider sits at the top of the clause rather than beneath it. Whatever the cause, the rider reads "at forty-two removals," and it is not clear whether the phrase is a running total or a ceiling. On the strict reading, the number forty-two within the Tower's document-forms is accounted at forty-two removals precisely, that is, it has been used forty-two times and is now exhausted; on the reading favored by the Under-Secretary, the phrase is "figurative," and the count may be continued with a note of essay.

The Vellum Original of Clause VII takes its own side. Clause VII, Addendum 3, provides that the numeral forty-two "shall not be accounted a quantity in any proceeding concerning the enumeration of the Original Sword-Bearers, who are to be recounted in their own room, and the count is to be made at the door." That the clause is now confined to a single room means the count has been disputed for as long as the Forty-Seven Original Sword-Bearers have been present in the archive. When the count of the original forty-two is read from a distance, the room is the doorway, and the number refers to the doorway. The Vellum Original is the authenticated original in the seventh iron strongroom and is not to be removed.

The Counting Floor incident, 41 of the current recension

In the winter of 41, the Chapter of the Counting Floor attempted to recount the forty-two at all forty-two numbered doors on the floor in a single sitting, on the view that the artifact authorized the count. The Archivist of the Small Registers, then C. Marrow, objected that the count would exhaust the numeral and its forty-second recitation would be the last. The Chapter proceeded. The count proceeded to 42 at the fourth door, and at the fifth, the table could not be counted, and the count halted. The floor's tally of the same count was recorded as 41, and the discrepancy has not been reconciled. The Chapter subsequently filed a correction to the count and, in the following year, the correction of the correction. The Chapter's clerk was reassigned to the South Reading Room and went on to write a history of the numeral, still in manuscript.

Record and qualified reservations

No copy of the Original 42 is in circulation. The thirteenth copy of the count remains in the archive at the South Reading Room, where it has been read by forty-two people. The last verified reading of the plate itself, made on a clear morning in the winter of the present year, gave forty-two. The Under-Secretary for Numerals records the reading and the reader's signature in the same hand; the Archivist of the Small Registers records the name of the reader in a different register. The two registers are compared at Convocation, where the artifact is brought out and the count is read aloud. The plate is available for inspection by the Under-Secretary. The plate is not to be polished.

"The numeral is not a quantity, and it is not to be counted as one. It is the count."

— The Original Dissent of Master Vance, Foundational Margin