The Provisional Calendar

The Provisional Calendar is a register of dates provisionally in force, administered by the Sub-Bureau of Temporal Reconciliation under clause 14 of the Third Concordance. It is not a calendar in the reckoning sense: it fixes no epoch, assigns no months, and cannot be used to date a document from first principles. It records instead which dates are, for the present, permitted to be used, and by whom. Entries are admitted, annotated, suspended, and — occasionally, after long deliberation — confirmed. The Provisional Calendar has never been described by the Sub-Bureau as complete, and a standing notice in the reading room of Stairwell 41 refers to it only as "current within the ordinary meaning" (Sub-Bureau Notice 12/9, posted at the fourth landing).

Origin and displacement of the Omicron entries

The Provisional Calendar was not composed. It was assembled out of what survived. When the Omicron Calendar was displaced by the Ascendant Calendar, the Third Concordance provided at clause 14 that entries still open in the Omicron register should not be closed, converted, or abandoned, but carried forward into a provisional register pending reconciliation. The practice was affirmed much later by Concordance 707-Alpha, which restated the operative words without alteration:

"Open entries shall pass from the Omicron Calendar into the Provisional Calendar without conversion, and shall retain their original designations until such time as the Sub-Bureau shall order otherwise, which it has not."

— Concordance 707-Alpha, Annex 3, clause 2

The consequence is a register in which dates of widely differing provenance sit side by side, unaltered. A reader consulting the Provisional Calendar for a given day may find beneath it three or four earlier designations, none of them reconciled, all of them in force. The Sub-Bureau has consistently declined to treat this as an error.

The transcribing warrant and the affair of Clerk-Provisional Thorn

Entries reach the Provisional Calendar by transcription, and transcription requires a warrant. The warrant for entries confirmed under the Librarian Provisional Aris Practice was held by Clerk-Provisional Aris Thorn from the 12th to the 13th Calendar, a tenure of unusual brevity that the Sub-Bureau has never formally explained and has twice been asked to.

Thorn's difficulty was one of sequence. During the winter of the 12th Calendar, an entry carried forward from the Omicron register was annotated, confirmed, and transcribed in that order across four days, so that the confirmation preceded the annotation it was said to rest upon. Thorn transcribed it anyway, noting in the margin that the order of operations was "a matter for the Sub-Bureau and not for the pen." The annotation was subsequently found to be defective, and the entry stood confirmed on a defective annotation for eleven days before anyone noticed. Thorn's warrant was not renewed. Thorn's marginal note remains legible and is cited more often than the entry it concerns.

Annotation under the Red Folio Precedent

The Librarians retain a right of annotation on the Provisional Calendar under the Red Folio Precedent. In practice this right is exercised heavily and disputed constantly. Annotation may qualify an entry, restrict the floors on which it may be used, or append a caution; it may not delete. The Precedent is silent on what an annotator may write, and the resulting marginalia range from single words to passages of several hundred words in a hand that the Sub-Bureau's copyists have described, in a memorandum of the 9th Calendar, as "confident."

A recurring point of friction concerns the Librarian-Provisional Aris, whose association with the Fifth Algorithmic Calendar gives their annotations a weight that other Librarians' annotations do not formally possess but practically acquire. The Sub-Bureau has ruled twice that all annotations under the Red Folio Precedent are of equal standing, and has twice been obliged to clarify what "equal standing" means in respect of the Aris annotations, without success.

Keying to the Temporal Sigil

The Provisional Calendar does not stand alone. The Sub-Bureau's Primary Chronology and the Provisional Calendar together key the Temporal Sigil in Provisional Shelf-Marks, so that a sigil read against one register without the other will return a shelf-mark that is plausible, consistent, and wrong. This is the single most common error in the reading rooms, and the Sub-Bureau has printed a caution on the reverse of every issued sheet. The caution is printed in the same size as the register itself, which has been raised with the Sub-Bureau repeatedly. It has not been changed.

Scholarly disagreement

Two positions persist. The first, associated with the annotators of Stairwell 41 and stated most fully in the marginal commentary surrounding the Concordance Calendar fascicles, holds that the Provisional Calendar is a calendar of exception — that its dates are permitted rather than fixed, and that a document dated by it is dated conditionally, remaining open to revision for as long as the entry stands unconfirmed. Under this reading the register is a list of permissions, and every date in it is provisional in the strict sense.

The second, advanced by the Sub-Bureau's own recensors and grounded in the wording of clause 14, holds that carriage without conversion makes the entries final in form and provisional only in origin — that the Omicron designations entered the Provisional Calendar whole, and that what is provisional is the arrangement, not the dates. On this reading the calendar can be consulted and relied upon exactly as any other, and the word "provisional" describes a historical fact about the register's assembly rather than any continuing uncertainty.

The dispute has practical consequences. Where the first position is accepted, 14 Metaxis 712 — the date on which Provisional Research Permit 4409 was first ratified — cannot be treated as settled, since the entry governing it remains unconfirmed. Where the second is accepted, it can. Both positions have been maintained in writing, by the same office, since the 11th Calendar.

Consultation of the Provisional Calendar is by warrant or by appointment. Food is not permitted at the reading desks.