Quoted By:
A seam in the Conduit! It is faint, as faint as an old scar, but even in this shit light, you were able to see it clearly. You are well aware that it could just be an imperfection in the Conduit, but considering that your father made this, you have a damned hard time believing that. And now that the 'body' of the Conduit has your undivided attention, and you are specifically looking for it, you notice several other uniform seams running the circumference of the Conduit. With so many regular seams on the 'body' of the Conduit, you have to assume that the Conduit was made in 'lengths' and then that these 'lengths' – or to use the more proper terminology, these Sub-Assemblies – were Woven together into the final Assembly that you see before you. Which … well, should have been obvious. Your father is much faster on the Life-Loom than you are, but considering how large this damned thing is, Weaving all of it in one go would have taken him … more than a day straight of work on the Loom.
But the seam that your eyes are on at the moment has another point of interest as well. Right beneath it, you can see some manner of cavitation. Your first thought is that this actually is an imperfection that slipped by your father, but given his skill and his meticulousness on the Loom, you immediately start to doubt yourself. And sure enough, once you start looking for little holes underneath the seams, they start to crop up like mushrooms after rain. Considering how small they are, how almost none of them are facing towards you, and the slippery way they disappear into the shadows inside the chimney, you aren't too surprised you didn't notice them before now – though you certainly are frustrated for overlooking them. Doubly frustrated, in fact, because the purpose of the cavitations are not immediately apparent – or if they have a purpose at all. It is possible that these are just marks left behind from the Weaving. After all, father must have made hundreds of these 'lengths', so you could see that at some point, he might have decided that the time and working material that he would have needed to spend smoothing over and covering up such marks could be better spent elsewhere ... but this is father you are talking about. His standards for his Constructs are exacting if not perfection itself, and more over, for someone with his skill at the Loom, making deep and marring Needle tracks such as these - if that is what these cavitations are - would be a deliberate choice. You know that he can work the Loom with hair-thin Needles, as opposed to the nail-thick ones that you have to use - in fact, there was one time that he demonstrated that he could Weave without setting the Needles at all; he managed just by pressing them against the target and working material. Of course, that was an exercise - he wouldn't complicate his Weaving with such hubris, not when he was able to work with non-marring hair-thin Needles, or unmake the marring of the thicker Needles.