Thread Master stretched his rusty form and rolled out of the webformaire mesh that neutralized the weight and the amplified, exaggerated signal mesh of his physical form. Caring for bodies was by now an old habit, learned over many lifetimes, but still a nuisance. He moved with the grace of one who operates from Without, but even so, his movements seemed gawkish and stilted to Catawbus, and always had. The man just had no flow to his bones! But, she thought fondly, he is still Good. And she uncurled, too, and pattered after him through the double-layered pneumatic portals of the deep interior core of their moon-retreat, down the long senso-foam corridors--like walking on water, she thought, and wondered where such a concept would ever have come from--and up the flowing lift-trail to a large domestically organized space nearer the surface, ensconced behind the rugged faces of a dormant ice volcano. From the walls, portals tuned to normal visible light for the moment showed sweeping vistas of blue frozen granite and sweeping clouds of white frozen methane-powder blowing over the craggy surfaces.

The man, tall for his kind and lean, leaned into an ancient antique leather covered box-like thing he called poppachair, and sipped thoughtfully at a plasti of smoothall he had dran from a cooldrawer in the wall. His keen blue eyes wandered across the snowscape, and then drifted to another time and space which she could not see. She waited patiently. He was gone longer than usual. When he stirred again, she thought him a question.

"When you go away like that, Threadman, where is it that you go?"

"I go back to a world I once lived on, Catawbus. Inward toward the Solstar, A water planet. It was very dear to me, long ago, long before I took this form."

"A WATER planet? Where? Wasn't it awful? Were you...were you wet????

"About 29 point nine units that way," he replied, waving his hand toward a distant glimmer in the frozen sky. As I say, it was long ago. In that life, we loved water more than anything." Catawba shuddered at the thought.

"It was where I first learned the mastery of threads, even so long ago," he went on. "You have no idea how different it was then. No-one knew about attentionemetics or meme-flows, except on a crude intuitive level, and we used huge things called electrons to signal each other using a code--like cavemen with signal fires!" He laughed.

She could not absorb it, having been too offended by the notion of loving water.

"You loved water??"

"Oh, yes, indeed. We had more water there than you have ever seen anywhere-- flows, billows, miles of it, rolling in the dawn. We would put on special equipment and go under it, moving like so many fishes, delighting in the taste, the smell and the way it felt. It was like homecoming in greens and blues, and it touched the very soul."

"Mraagh!!", she cursed. "Why would water mean so much? What could possibly be the appeal?"

"It was historical," Thread Master smiled. "Very few understood the reason, but no-one could escape it at some level of their makeup. Even if they didn't know, they resonated to it."

"What reason?"

"It was in the forming of water that the secret of human tears was born. It is one thing we have never left behind."

Catawbus purred skeptically, and curled up on his lap to ponder the ways of men.