Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 578
Maybe I could run back to the airlock without being
discovered--but I suppressed the thought. For at least this
moment I was free of my own manufactured instinct for
survival. I chose to revel in the freedom, and walked down the
cave floor.
As I approached the cube I recognized it: it was a fractal
lab. ...I see by your blank expression that you don’t know what
that is. Quite simply, the cube was actually eight cubes stacked
together, four and four. Each face of the larger cube exposed
open sides of two of the cubes--like square-cut rooms without
doors. The inside walls of these cubes were subdivided into
four as well, with two diagonal faces open like smaller rooms.
Inside these, subdivision again, and so on and on down the
scale. The faces of the walls that were not open were
festooned with instruments, arms, sensors, containment
vessels--everything imaginable for investigation. These scaled
down to, from macro-sized arms fifteen meters long down to
microscopic tweezers. You can throw anything into a fractal
lab and it will be devoured and all its secrets learned from top
to bottom.
Whatever purpose the swans had had for this lab, they
had abandoned it. It was being cannibalized now for parts.
Parts for what?
I snuck by the working spiders and skirted the base of the
lab to look out at the grey, undulating floor of the cavern. And
there I saw myself.
--It was uncanny. A shimmering silver bird crouched in
the grey dust, not twenty meters away. It was a perfect replica
of the starship Desert Voice. Beyond it I spotted another, and
then a field of a dozen more. The nearest one was incomplete;
spiders were busily building its left wing from salvaged lab
parts.