Third Moon of Perelandra

The Third Moon of Perelandra is a reinstated celestial object, presently catalogued on Floor 888 following the appeal heard on Floor 201. It is the only object in the Tower's holdings whose catalogue status carries a formal reinstatement date — the entry now reads simply: reinstated; see Floor 888 — and this brevity is itself a source of irritation to three separate offices, none of which has succeeded in having it expanded.

The Moon should not be confused with the Tetrahedral Moon, the Spherical Moon, or the Seventeenth Shadow of the Second Moon of Gol77 Alpha, all of which remain in continuous catalogue standing. The Third Moon of Perelandra occupies a peculiar position in the archive: it is the object most often cited to establish the principle that catalogue status can be reversed, and the object least often described in any other respect.

Appeal and reinstatement

Between its latest delisting and its reinstatement, the Third Moon of Perelandra existed in the Tower only as a negative entry — a line of India-ink struck through on the catalogue slip, with the annotation pending beneath it in the hand of a junior clerk. The appeal heard on Floor 201 was not a hearing in the ordinary sense; no counsel was appointed and no evidence was taken. The record, preserved as Lambda-Celestial 11γ, describes a session lasting eleven minutes in which a Senior Librarian read the original entry aloud, paused, and read it aloud again. On the second reading the entry was deemed to have been restored. The scribe present noted the outcome as "carried by repetition".

The reinstatement was not uncontested. The opposing recension, held in the Annexes of the Third Concordance, argues that a catalogue entry cannot be restored by recitation, since the act of recitation already appears in the schedule of Ceremonial Placement of sigils and has there a different purpose. Supporters of the reinstatement reply that the appeal was heard on Floor 201, and that Floor 201 is not a floor on which Third Concordance restrictions apply. No ruling has settled this.

Floor 888 and the question of habitation

Floor 888 is a low-ceilinged storage gallery of pale shelving, allocated to reinstated objects and to objects whose reinstatement has been foreseen but not yet effected. The Third Moon of Perelandra is held there on a plinth of the standard reinstatement pattern, adjacent to the Third Sondergang Expedition inventory. Visitors are permitted to examine the plinth but must not touch the lunar surface; a notice fixed to the rail reads, in the flat register of the Tower's house rules, "The surface does not buff out. There are no other copies."

The Moon's dimensions are recorded inconsistently. The inventory lists a diameter of "the usual third-moon dimension", while an addendum in Third Spiral Administrative Circular 44-A gives the object's apparent size as "whatever the plinth can bear". The Keeper of Floor 888, Keeper Anselm, has on two occasions requested that a precise measurement be taken and on both occasions been told that the instrument required is kept on Floor 201 and cannot be removed from it.

The Perelandra question

No floor named Perelandra appears in the catalogue, and no record survives of a first or second moon of that name. The Librarians have consistently declined to reconstruct the missing sequence, on the grounds that the Third Librarianate settled the matter during its long dispute with the Heliometric Guild, when it ruled that "a third moon is not to be inferred to have siblings, nor to be inferred not to have them" (Thirty-Third Concordance, Annex 12). The phrase is much quoted at the Tower's public readings, usually by someone who has not read the rest of the annex.

"The object is reinstated. The object's earlier history is not reinstated. These are separate ledgers and are to be signed by separate hands."

— Addendum to the Third Concordance, clause 3.β

Scholarly disagreement

Two recensions of the appeal stand against one another. The Floor 201 recension holds that reinstatement restored the Third Moon of Perelandra to the catalogue, that is, to the position it would have held had it never been struck through; it therefore treats Floor 888 as a convenience of storage and not as a catalogue location. The Floor 888 recension, defended in Apocryphal Addenda to the Third Concordance, holds the reverse: the object was reinstated at Floor 888, and any earlier position in the sequence is lost with the strikethrough.

The disagreement matters practically. If the Floor 201 recension is correct, the Moon should be re-entered under the numerical sequence unaffected by the strikethrough, which would place it near the Second Catalogue of Terrestrial Objects. If the Floor 888 recension is correct, its number is its floor and its floor is its number, and the entry is complete as written.

An attempt was made in the winter of the year following reinstatement to resolve the matter by requesting a third opinion from the Heliometric Guild. The Guild returned the request unopened, noting only that the Third Moon was outside its remit and that enquiries concerning three-moon systems should be directed to the Third Sondergang Expedition, which had by then been absent for some time. The request is still in the out-tray on Floor 201. There is, for the record, no out-tray on Floor 201; the request is therefore in the corridor.

Status

The Third Moon of Perelandra remains catalogued on Floor 888 and remains, by the Tower's reckoning, reinstated. It is cited in Ordinance 899.α as the leading precedent in matters of restored status, and the wording of that ordinance — "restored is restored, and is not to be asked after" — has to date prevented every further challenge. The Moon is, in consequence, one of the few objects in the Tower whose documentation is shorter than its history.