Now, in all honesty, a historical reproduction of the scene would omit these details and anachronisms. The more realistic version of events is this: his remote, stranded on the Earth (due to the relay satellite being out of line-of-sight), made contact through the local life forms with a regional segment of the biosphere Cerebelline mind, who, for a nominal fee, pa**ed some of his thoughts through her living circuitry, one tree to the next, to a transmission point elsewhere on the planet that could reach the relay. Since Cerebellines often cannot tell, or do not care to tell, where their thoughts end and visiting thoughts begin, perhaps she snooped on the information stream, did an an*lysis of the denotation and connotation pattern, and noticed that Ulysses was a connoisseur or aficionado of Terran biology and botany; an antiquarian like her.
Since he had hired her in any case to help with his failing oceanic ecosystems, they had much to discuss, and many similarities of thought and priority-protocol to find.
Where the idea came from for her to reorganize herself into a female psychology, and grow the parasympathetic and brain-stem impersonating systems in her various parallel decision nodes to trigger the complex formation known as romantic love, that we cannot tell, not unless Warmind releases his copies of her ancient templates.
The idea for a love affair came from somewhere. The evidence points to a hidden Eighth Mental Structure operation. If so, the love was doomed from the start, if not false from the start.
And yet…And yet…It might have been a natural thing. It is commonplace for Cerebellines of the Green Symphony Aesthetic (there are twelve distinct schools comprised under this aesthetic protocol) when terraforming a planet to impregnate themselves with the proper psychology to fall in love with their handicraft; in effect, to love, to become, and to subsume themselves into whatever bit of ecology is their work. (White Cerebellines who work with information ecologies have a similar maternal outpouring in their more abstract mathematical creations to that which Green Cerebelline have with their plants and pets.)
Most worlds are dead to begin with, no matter how beautiful, or have nothing more complex than one-celled organisms. A Cerebelline can love even the sulfur-drenched and cloud-choked hell of stormy Venus, or the cold and rusty desert waste of long- dead Mars, loving and destroying, even as her many microbes begin their work to make the unearthly worlds earthlike. But Ulysses was alive: his thought systems and remotes and partial-selves occupied every niche of his primitive ecology, precisely because it was primitive. He had to do everything himself.
And so there he was, wherever she went or sent versions of herself.
He was already in the tanks growing algae for his simple and crablike von Neumanns. The servants all were radio-linked to him, so that he would wave at her industrious physician-fish with a pa**ing crab-claw. He was there (since he had to maintain the bodies) in the unoccupied dolphin forms any tenants of his were not using. He was in the space elevator, a voice telling a joke. He was in the aerial units that looked like awkward bats, doing a comical mock mating-dance to startle the sleeker and more earthlike halcyon and sea mews she was introducing, until she called a flock of starlings to drive them off. He was onboard the ship, making a sardonic observation when she sailed to the edge of the parasol to set the timed cycles of daily and seasonal sunbeams to fall upon his little shining oceanic globe. And he was in the thought-space they both used when poring over the timed-maps and atlases that predicted where and how he was to grow his coral reefs.
They named the island together, the first island his water-smothered world had ever known, and he made a joke about picking the names of babies, and she made a reference to Ducaleon and Phyrra, and by that time, she was embracing his whole world, each hemisphere as if in cupped hands, with some form of bird or fish or creeping thing or sea-plant, and he could not have gotten away from her had he willed.
So, something like what the poets say, when they tell of Ulysses singing by the lakeshore, and Penelope arising nude and newly made from the waters, pausing to wring out her hair, did indeed happen; something like, but more complex and more deliberate than what poets say.
Because he did walk her world, after all, not just in that original ten-foot cyborg body, but in a hundred scuttling vehicles, ratlike things or flying drones, or, when she offered them, as a pack of fierce black dogs.
Everywhere the black dogs went, they scented or saw signs of decay: erosion was washing away topsoil, trees were dying due to lack of simple nutrients, the salmon populations were falling, bears that should have been in heat sniffed pa**ing she- bears and did nothing. Ten thousand little errors had entered the ecological code, and the system was not robust enough to correct itself, not without evolving into something more suited to the Eta Carina system.
And, yes, the so-called “native” forms had evolved in niches where the Cerebelline mind was not concentrating her resources. Black oily one-celled life and multicellular sponges streaked the sides of tall mountains, staining the snow black, or crusting the rocks, unsightly as an oil slick. These organisms were highly resistant to the radiation and X-ray fevers that the parasol could not deflect, and thrived in areas where earthly life developed leukemia and bred poorly.
When the dogs smelled the wind that blew from black-streaked mountainsides, and scented spores of post-terrene life, they raised their red mouths and howled.
The packs walked up and down, to and fro about the Earth. When they reported to Ulysses One, his mind could put together the million-sided puzzle their hundred canine minds could not see, and which, she herself, being a Cerebelline, might not see.
It was suicide. Penelope was slowly relaxing her grip on life.
There were, to be sure, enough resources in the Chrysopoeian Oecumene to rebuild or reconstruct her, but there was not the will. Very little of the marketplace of ideas, much less the marketplace of resources, was devoted to keeping alive this morbid monument to a dead world. It was an expensive mausoleum.
So he had to find a way to cheer her up. He had to serenade her and vow wild vows. The poetical image of his man-remote bringing a guitar to sing to her scattered animal-minds is closer to the truth than a flat description of the truth conveys.
They talked of things past.