Constance Ilori

Field Observations

She is courteous in a way petitioners find disarming and then, later, unbearable. She stands when they come in. She uses their names. She explains the substrate to them in plain words, slowly, twice if they need it, and she does not hurry when a hearing overruns.

Asked whether a transcript is accurate, she says she has no way to know, and then says nothing else. It reads as stonewalling for about a minute, until you notice she is the only person in the room who has not claimed to know something she cannot. The Boalt Docket's volunteers have cross-examined her four times and have never caught her overstating a condition finding by so much as a millimetre.

She took her quarters four floors above the tray wall because the building holds its humidity and her own rooms therefore cannot drift. She mentions this as a practical convenience. She has lived there for sixteen years.

The pencil notebook is not evidence and has never been cited. It has eleven entries: a date, a tray number, a petitioner's name. Ruta Abelló's is the most recent, and it is the only entry with anything written after the name, which is two words — thanked me — and nothing else.

History

She came up through pre-Cascade paper conservation, which in 2160s Old Town meant salvage: she spent her twenties stabilising water-damaged municipal stock in a shed off the shelf road, most of it worthless, some of it the only surviving copy of something. She learned the trade in a decade when the districts were still opening bonded instruments to settle arguments, and she has read the eleven case files from before 2161 more carefully than the people who cite them.

The Office hired her in 2165 and she took the tray wall in 2165 and has held it since. The humidity setpoint she inherited in 2166 has not been changed, on her recommendation, twice reviewed.

Her first hearing was in 2168, a water schedule, and she over-prepared badly: forty pages of substrate analysis, three charts, an argument. Counsel for the petitioner cut her off at the second chart to ask what the sheet could survive, and she answered in one sentence, and the motion was refused on that sentence. She has prepared one page for every hearing since.

She has written to the Office twice — 2179 and 2183 — asking what a conservator is permitted to do with a sheet whose substrate is approaching the end of its rated life, given that the loss will happen either way and only one version of it produces a reading. Both replies thanked her for her diligence. She filed both replies in the same folder as the letters and has not written a third.

Open Questions

• She keeps the notebook, has never cited it, and wrote two words beside one name. What she thinks she is keeping it for is not on any record.
• The Office's charter calls her post a transcriber's assistantship. She has never asked to have it corrected, and she is the only conservator the Office has ever appointed.
• She was right about the humidity twice and the sheets are still failing on the rated curve. Whether she has calculated the year the first one goes, and for which tray, she has not said.