Penelope covered the little world of Ulysses with her greenware, and embraced him, and coded part of herself to think like him. Penelope was trying to get to know him.
Not very successfully. The humor of their mutual incomprehension was not lost on Ulysses. The surface area of a large world, even if covered by a single decentralized mind, so outma**es and can so outthink a single human, that even to compare it to an adult bespeaking a child is unfair. But the surface bioma** of even a terrestrial- size planet is likewise insignificant compared to the compact volume of a moon-size logic diamond. When she visited him on his world, he was alarmingly smarter; when he visited her on hers, he was alarmingly stupid.
So when his man-form walked alone along her planet, or when her life forms occupied but a fragment of his oceans, the love was like worship. She was an earth- goddess to him, sad but pure. He was a sea-god to her, quixotic and filled with unexpected quirks of dark humor.
They spoke of their own past. She would ask him, “What was it like? To leave everything you knew?”
And he would ask her, “What was it like? To lose everything you knew?”