It was just after noon, when the third moon of Ulsip was well through the final bend of its figure-eight across the sky. Turtur citizens mingled around me, some nibbled on various packaged snacks such as cribrits, AR8s, or those inflatable PufDumps, some lay around on the grass basking in the cosmic rays reflected from Ulsip’s tinny surface. This serenity, as I would soon discovered, masked a disturbing illusion.

Guriwegler Park, bountiful in its botanical variety at this time of year, this was where the first abnormality of this planet introduced itself to me. There, a fellow dressed foot to toe in the finest full-piece suit one could get this side of the Malactic Muff, lay asleep on a park bench. His arms strapped across his chest like he was put to rest in a fur-lined coffin. Of course, baffled I was not by an impulsive urban rest from such a tight gentleman – these social norms are common practise in planets with lemniscate moons. His head rolled around that bench like a turnip on a wooden block, every snore driving this gyration. What terrible neck support, I thought to myself as I walked by. I turned off the path and under an arc of topiary in the image of two asteroids meeting with force. The artists had even managed to depict the start of the explosion with a scattering of autumn leaves at the center. Ducking past – for it was such a convincing representation that my space-pilot instincts told me to move by quickly – I found myself inside an enclave of the garden, where I was not alone. At the base of a young wodo, a tiny gazeep nibbled its long branch. The iconic blue hue was stripped clear by now and exposed a subble, white bark underneath. This ruthless exchange of nature enamored me for a few minutes, and then I turned back to find the path, only to see – yes, by the depiction of the asteroid spar – what I had overlooked before: two black plants, stuck out at the end of one of the asteroid bushes, like large eggs. I’d mistaken this exotic variety of succulent for a pair of fine, polished black leather soles. As I went to ask of this vernal plant to whom was its shoe polisher and, if it would be so kind as to refer me to direct me to them, to my astonishment the two buds fidgeted! As would anyone in that situation, I believed that the first communication between human and agave-esque entities had occurred – I the epicenter of the engagement – and I explored this relationship with a pen and notebook at hand (I never travel anywhere without them).

I asked my succulent acquaintance about the weather, about its preferred Ulsip orientation, about its passage of time, and its tassage du pain. How did the air smell from where it sat down there? A metallic undertone, I imagined, from the ferrous soil? My breadth of topics, I hoped, would garner interest in at least one direction, but it did not twitch again. Perhaps, I considered, it might be preoccupied at this moment. But then I spoke of shoes, of soles, and of being leather-bound below the knees and it positively buzzed. I searched for the root of this mystery and looked behind and under the plant to find the exact thing. There I found not a root but an ankle, and to that ankle grew a leg, a torso, and my-oh-my it was budding a head and two arms!

“Hey!” shouted the face as I explored it with a finger. Its undeniable realism struck me then and I realized it was not a rare succulent I had been in conversation with, but the foot of a napping gentleman. His garb equally dashing as the one I had seen on the bench earlier. I receded from the bush and left the gentleman to his peaceful slumber in the soil. As he settled back to sleep, I could not help but notice that he too had nothing supporting his neck.

And so, through the rest of that day, whether it was the park, or the garden, the town hall, or a stairwell, the count of those resting without anything other than a pocket of air between neck and floor grew. Exhausted from the mounting concern for the neck health of the Turturians, I booked a room in a hotel, whose presentation I would put just short of a palace for a Surbine Quing. Finally rested in my room, with the astonishment of the day shut behind my room door, I turned off the lights of my room and lay on my bed, let my head lay back. Would you believe my astonishment when I found not a pillow below my head but instead hard iron? Such expensive establishments are famed for promenading their value through materials with atomic structures less and less forgiving, so it was not the ferric block that took me aback, but my back in fact, and that it was at an equal droop to my head. Fortunately, I had taken my backpack from the ship and used this as a temporary, albeit pointed, head rest.

The next morning I received news from the bell-girl who had laundered my suit: there was a protest in the town square. I checked the third moon of Ulsip and saw that, yes, I had one hour until my meeting with the Great Empear Emperor of Anatomicalounge. I had a few moments for a curious diversion. With little time to spare, I went to the square, seizing a fresh crumpet from the breakfast buffet on my way out.

Turtur’s town square is situated at the equator of Turtur and this means that the third moon of Ulsip performs its curls directly above, unrelenting in its cosmic-ray assault. This transforms the town square, hemmed in bismuth flakes as it is, into a multi-chromatic rainbow soup for the eyes. A famed engineer once invented spoons for the eyeballs, intent on drinking this soup, but upon its reveal he mysteriously disappeared. This is the most famous thing to have come from the planet Turtur. Otherwise it is not a common tourist destination.

When I arrived at the square it was undergoing a phase transition from a green lustre to a pink as hot as a cherry blossom forest aflame. It was an effort to focus on the color, what with the large crowd of people swimming about it in an angry throng. My, they shouted all sorts of things and held banners that faced every nautical direction. What they lacked was the coordination I was accustomed to in a protest. One sign said, “Down with the patriarchal mother!” Another yelled, “Yes or no is not tomorrow!” And a third, “Keep your hands where I can’t see them!” Total calamity was in full swing, for no person was correctly navigating and had instead concluded that the method for traversal was via series of collisions with the maximum number of bodies. It was a hot bath of methane all aflutter. It dawned on me that without order, the event would fail quicker than an old Moulag could snap its only two fingers. I hesitated at first, unsure of a clear access point, for gaps opened and closed too quickly. Eventually I found my way inside the mob and got to work with creating order in this hot gas. A small group I maneuvered so that they now stood shoulder to shoulder and marched forth, but only three steps in and a foot or tailcoat caught and the crew careened apart. And then, when I went to help up one of the Turtians whom had stumbled on her, it finally struck me as to the cause of this mayhem. It was clear then, for the neck support – or lack of it – which I had continuously encountered throughout the city the day before, and for how my bed last night had not catered for the caper in my neck. This Turian, and every individual in that assemblage and the city, lacked a forward-facing face, as in a face that looked in the direction of where one wished to move. Perhaps by some cruel curse of nature, every person’s face looked straight up, that is in the direction that no one ever moves. Moreover those ingratiating Ulsip rays came directly onto their exposed eye holes.

During my meeting with the Great Empear Emperor of Anatomicalounge that morning, I disclosed this observation. She was as surprised as I was to hear this, seated on her horizontal throne so she could look at me directly. She then asked what was to be done? For she could not see that evolution was the solution, this would take far too many generations, not to mention a regiment mating program. I showed here a blueprint that I had scribbled in my notebook while I had sat outside the palace, waiting for our meeting. Her eyes crossed over it many times like she was pulling it apart thread by thread, and then she asked me to explain it, which I did. Not one pen stroke did I gloss over, and when I had finished, the third moon of Ulsip was already on its final dip. On my way out, I bowed deep and admired the Great Empear Emperor for her open-mindedness.

I left Turtur twenty slips of Ulsip later. My ship a little heavier, for it was now carrying a marble statue of a Moulag, which they emperor had gifted me in parting. It is always sad to leave a planet behind when one has spent such a considerable amount of time with it. As I took to the air and rumbled through their atmosphere which was thicker than an overcooked roux, I turned around one last time to look upon the planet. This time it wasn’t the third moon of Ulsip’s argentiferous presence that shone too bright to look at Turtur directly, but the planet itself beamed like a sapling sun. And where it beamed I looked and found exactly myself and the stars behind me – a perfect reflection as I flew off and away. In fact, the third moon of Ulsip was no more, for it had been stripped right to the core and flew away in a solar breeze. That metal was then used to wrap all around Turtur and encase the planet in a giant mirror, so that looking up did not constitute a disadvantage, for above the Turturians was everything.