Third Concordance, clause 4,112.7

Third Concordance, clause 4,112.7 is a scheduling provision of the Third Concordance concerning the ordering of clause readings in the Reading Halls, and the only clause of that instrument whose number is held to have been assigned before the clause was written. It provides, in its entirety, that "no clause of this Concordance shall be read on a floor whose number exceeds the clause's own; readings halted by reaching such a floor shall be resumed at the same hour on the same day of the following year" (Third Concordance, clause 4,112.7, unamended). The wording is short. The consequences are not.

The clause was drafted in the winter of the year the Tower records as 6 After Recension, during the renumbering dispute that also produced Clause 112 Annex Delta Third Concordance. Draftsmen working from an earlier and now lost schedule had reserved the number 4,112 for a future provision of unknown content and, needing somewhere to put a housekeeping rule about reading order, inserted it there on the understanding that it could be moved later. Clause 4,112.7 has not been moved. The Librarian Sennet Vole, who served as Keeper of the Reading Register for eleven years, argued in a memorandum of 14 Pelagius that the number was "provisional in intent and permanent only by inattention," a phrase later quoted against her at three separate hearings.

The practical difficulty

Because floors of the Tower are not numbered sequentially, it is not possible to establish in advance whether a given hall stands above or below the clause's own number of 4,112. A reader ascending from Floor 88 may deliver clause 4,112.7 in full before reaching Floor 9,001, where it must be abandoned mid-sentence; a reader descending from Floor 30,000 may be halted before the clause's first line. The Reading Register accordingly maintains a standing table of interruptions, recording for each hall the exact word at which the reading ceases. The table for clause 4,112.7 currently runs to forty-one volumes. The most frequently recorded stopping point is the word "resumed."

Readers who reach the stopping floor are instructed to close the Concordance without marking the page, since marking it would constitute an amendment. The clause is therefore resumed the following year from the beginning of the sentence, not from the interruption. Attempts to resume from the interruption were ruled irregular in a decision of the Office of the Receiver of Irregularities, which held that a reading begun at the middle of a clause is "a different reading wearing the same clothes" (Receiver's Decision 2,204, citing Third Concordance, Clause 11, Annex Gamma).

Relation to the Erasure clauses

The clause's one substantive safeguard is its prohibition on readings that span a year boundary without registration. In practice this has brought it into conflict with Third Concordance, Clause 11, Annex Gamma, which permits Erasure of clause readings that cannot be completed, and with the recensions gathered under Third Concordance, Clause 33, Annex Delta. The Office of Voluntary Correspondence, established under Clause 22 of the Third Concordance, has twice petitioned to have clause 4,112.7 read as an Erasure provision rather than a scheduling one; both petitions were refused on the ground that a scheduling provision may be amended by schedule, whereas an Erasure provision may not.

"A clause that cannot be finished is not thereby erased. It is merely unfinished, and the Tower has always kept its unfinished things."

— Third Concordance, Clause 33, Annex Delta, recension of clause 4,112.7

The competing view, advanced by the Office of the Receiver of Irregularities under the authority of Third Concordance, Clause 37, Third Revision, holds that an uncompletable reading is an irregularity of the first order and should be referred upward rather than repeated annually. The Receiver has never acted on this view, and the annual repetitions continue.

The Vole reading and its critics

Scholarly opinion divides on whether clause 4,112.7 was ever intended to bind. Vole's memorandum remains the standard statement of the minority position: the number was a placeholder, the clause a marginal note that survived into the fair copy through the negligence of a copyist whose name the Tower does not record. The majority position, set out most fully in the Reading Register's own preface, observes that a clause is not made less binding by being inconvenient, and that the Concordance contains no procedure for striking text merely because it is strange. The preface adds, in a passage much cited, that "the number was assigned before the clause existed, which is the ordinary condition of all numbers" (Reading Register, preface to the interruption tables).

A third view, associated with the Signal-Beaters established by Clause 22 of the Third Concordance, regards the clause as a deliberately planted interruption whose function is to keep readers moving between floors. On this account the annual repetition is not a failure of drafting but the whole point of the provision, and the forty-one volumes of interruption tables are its intended product. No Concordance supports this reading. None forbids it either.

Notable incidents

In the winter of 3,188 a reader named Corbel Anstis attempted the clause on Floor 4,113 and was halted after two words. Returning the following year, he was halted after one. The Register's note records that Anstis "declined a third attempt on grounds of diminishing returns," a phrase the Receiver later ruled informal but permitted to stand.

The clause is not read aloud in the Eastern Stair. Readers are asked to leave their lamps at the door.

More serious was the affair of the duplicate reading, in which two halls on floors numbered 4,112 read clause 4,112.7 simultaneously, each believing itself to be the stopping floor. Because the clause specifies resumption "on the same day of the following year," the Register was obliged to enter the second year twice, and the resulting discrepancy in the interruption tables has never been resolved. The matter is presently cited in support of the view, drawn from Clause 7 of the Third Concordance and its operational definition of a holding, that a reading is a holding only where it is unique.

Current status

Clause 4,112.7 remains in force and unamended. It has survived the supersession of earlier provisional definitions under Third Concordance, Clause VII and the later revisions of Clause 12 of the Third Concordance, neither of which touched its text. The Reading Register continues to add to the interruption tables at the rate of roughly one volume every two years. Readers wishing to consult the clause in full are advised to begin on a low floor and ascend, and to allow for the possibility that they will not finish this year.