Landing on anti-spherical planets was always a precarious process. No smooth fields of gravity could get you clean down, the bulges of the planet pulling you in all sorts of ways unevenly. He eventually touched down on an open plane, straddling three mountains turned blue by the sunlight of a blue dwarf the planet orbited. The plane was vast enough to fit a few whales inside, and was easy to land on because there were no tall trees or vegetation to disguise the terrain.

Duf hopped from his ship so quick the engines were still wheezing and popping and cooling. He landed up to his waist in metallic tendrils. He had thought, from up in the atmosphere, these were the wheats, or wheat-equivalents, of an American plane. Waves ran across them from strong winds, they shone gold, just like their grainy cousins.

Duf was techno-sceptical, preferred his machines unconscious, and fundamentally believed self-organization should be left to soft matter not cogs. For that reason he was not comfortable being submerged in a sea of robotic snakes. By instinct rather than intellect, he seized one and pulled. It came out like a potato, so not without a bit of a tug and a twist. Duf had expect a writhe drama, those convulsions that worms or sea snakes played in throws of death pains. But rather, the tendril he pulled went limp like a wet rag. He shuffled his hand to feel its weight and then because he forgot he was in a hurry, threw it over his shoulder and marched on.

Perhaps it was an illusion, but Duf swore the tendrils were parting for him as he strode on. There was not a wind around – this planet had thin, methane atmosphere that sat heavy rather than flowed – yet the tendrils acted like a real gale was upon them, but a strange gale. For it came in a circular pattern from above, more like ripples of rain on a pond. It happened like this: one tendril, such a subtle fold of its end-effector, say to the east, would trigger a response in only its direct neighbours, them following the same degree of tilt. The message would be heard and sent on, each neighbour of the neighbours telling them the news: bend a little east. Out like a wave, like a broadcast, the eastward bend would eventually find its way to the mile-breadth of the plane, yet a-hundred other messages had been sent out before this, and more ripples went about in other ways.

It was far easier to see this emergent phenomena from above. At almost eye level with the mechanical wheat, all Duf saw was a sudden flick of a few far off tendrils and then felt the ones near him whap him on the knees. They were light things, but they had clearly been educated by a whips for the flicks stung even through Duf’s spacesuit. At one point he stopped, turned to one that had just hit his knee in a real sore way, and told it right off with strong intergalactic language and a defiant tone. He received in reply a second whip, considerably stronger.

Duf made it out of the edge of the field and came across a house and a man. The man had his back to Duf and was digging something in the dirt using a remote spade. He had long, curly grey hair and hunched, with so much emotion in the muscles in his back that Duf mistook it for his face at first. The house was a cottage, the size of five kiosks and assembled as such: it had five balconies, five front doors, and five contrasting colours, all welded together like a pentagon.

“Hello there!” said Duf, in the intergalactic language. He had on his spacesuit a microphone that allowed him to emit noise from his suit. What he had not accounted for was how sound travels in a sticky, methane air. It made it to ears of the man quieter than a breeze, were there breezes on this planet.

Rather than try again, Duf planned an introduction by way of sight, so as not scare the man. With only a backside to go off, Duf had to make a few assumptions about the man, namely that he had a frontside that was similar to a human’s frontside. He walked around the west side of the house, planning to circle it so that when he came around the east side he would be in clear view of the man’s frontside. On his way around, he had a good look at the parts of the house. The colour scheme he found a bit tasteless for this world. Most of the hues here were greens and greys and browns, heavily saturated, very much plucked from a swamp. Sometimes the odd purple or yellow pigment came in to balance the mulchy feel, but that was as risky as nature cared to go. This pentagonal house, on the other hand, had elected for the five primary colours of a neon sign: red, blue, green, yellow, pink, and white. The doors were black, which was horrible. Duf came around the house, now ready to address the man who must have seen him by now. He stopped and had to double take and assure himself he had not somehow been turned around. But he was not because he had started at the red house and was now at the white one.

Duf looked at the frontside of the man and studied it for signs of eyes. But, no, he was not being deceived and the man had not turned around, for the remote shovel was in front of him. The man, well, his frontside was identical to his backside. Clavicles, the taper of the lower spine, even how it curved into the neck. Identical. Duf frowned and decided the best action was a direct action. He walked up to the two-sided man and waved as he did, just in case he had missed a face hidden in all that backness.

Despite having to backsides, the man still had two very front-oriented human arms. These fiddled at a remote, clunky as a brick, with a long antenna. About a pace and a half from where the man stood was a remote spade, which was a digging shovel with the handle of it removed. It performed deep scooping strides of the dirt, and with a marked precision had dug the first half of a star-shaped hole.

“Ho there!” shouted Duf, now close enough to make more than a squeak. The man did not stop punching buttons on the remote control, but he did smile. Smile? It was no smile he was accustomed to, thought Duf, but he was a man of interplanetary travel and had a brain capable of pattern-matching smiles of much variation. This smile, he concluded, was a back smile, assembled of reorientation of the back muscles, the clavicles bending slightly up in a grin.

“Good day!” said the remote spade. Duf felt incredibly embarrassed for a second. His biases had assumed non-sentience of the spade. Duf kneeled down to be level with the spade and spoke, “What a quaint farm you have here.”

“No need to kneel, please.” spoke the spade. The sound came from somewhere on the spade’s front, but the man’s backs moved with the sound, “I have this remote two-backed man that I use for interfacing communication with visitors of your type.”

“Oh, how very thoughtful of you,” said Duf, and bowed to the remote man. The man bowed back. “What are you digging?”

“Why, not much, just a star-shaped hole today. Something simple, something I won’t get to invested in should it go to pot. Yesterday I dug a hole the shape of my late grandmother, it even had a wart on its chin, just as she did. But,” and the shovel stopped digging and listed a little, the sun caught it and it shone blue, “it was all filled up by this morning, soil packed, fresh grass laid – as if it was never there.”

Duf took a moment to think upon all the textbooks he had read about gardening phenomena. There were self-digging holes, self-growing plants, but events involving the impeccable inversion of a hole fresh dug? It was beyond him.

“I’m afraid I am as confounded as you are and equally saddened to hear such a depiction of love to your late grandmother was so heartlessly filled-in.”

“Ah, do not worry yourself. The concern is noted and appreciated, but it is for me to figure out. You are probably here to see the electric seaweeds, yes? Come let’s go.”

The man turned and started walking off in the direction of the field and Duf’s ship. Duf decided the control in the hand of the remote man was purely for show. The spade slid along the ground beside them, flat like a sled. They came to the edge of the field of mechanical tendrils and there they stopped. The remote man raised his arms in a wide hug as if in an attempt to hug the whole crop at once.

“My electric seaweed farm,” said the spade.

“Certainly a very fine harvest,” said Duf, not knowing the first thing about electric seaweed.

“Indeed, indeed,” said the spade. The remote man then stepped forward and plucked one of the tendrils. It went limp in his hand, as it had done for Duf.

“Would you like a taste?” The remote man lifted the electric seaweed towards Duf.

“I’m afraid my kind is unable to digest anything that is not composed of four specific elements of the periodic table.”

“Ah shame. Which ones?”

“Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and a Magnesium if in small amounts.”

One of the remote man’s backs hunched a little in disappointment. He plugged the electric seaweed right where he had plucked it from the ground and after a moment, it sprung right back up, erect. Suddenly all the seaweed was pushed almost to the horizontal as a great braying sound came from the mountains. It shook the ground, the remote man, and Duf had to tighten his knees to stop from falling over.

“What was that?” asked Duf. The spade needed not to answer because the reply came in a treble of stomps, now somewhere deep in the field. They were growing louder and louder.

“Flatten out!” shouted the spade. Duf turned to the spade and saw it hadn’t budged. But the remote man, he was lying on the ground on his back, his arms splayed to the sides like a starfish. Duf followed suit, but regretfully chose to lie on his stomach instead of his back, leaving him staring at the dull, brown soil rather than the expanse of the sky. Before he had time to flip over, the thunderous stomps were atop them and a shadow passed over Duf. Because his helmet was like a fishbowl, Duf could not even tilt his head to glance at the cause of the great shadow. From what Duf could deduce, it was a shadow of a thing with fur, for at the edges it sort of frayed and dissolved. It also had curious non-shadow elements to it: waves of light beams, like caustic patterns on the bottom of a swimming pool.

Once the shadow passed, which by Duf’s count was just short of a minute, Duf risked a peek. To do so required him to rotate himself a full half-spin because he had foolishly splayed himself so that he faced the field, his toes pointing the way the lumbering thing had run to. By the time he had spun about, all he saw was the rainbow cottage backed by two snow-topped mountains, and a few clouds clinging far off.

“What was that?” said Duf, standing up and dusting his knees. The remote man stood up too, but was not concerned with a caking of mud he had collected from lying in a wet patch of the soil.

“That,” said the spade, “was a remote fuf-grumper. Version seven, if I am not mistaking the sound of its trounce.”