The large sign had been newly painted in a garish tartan scriptThe Clan MacHayakawa Golf Course. And, beneath it, Members Only.
“A golf course?” Mildred said. “In the midst of all this polluted desert, you got a golf course?”
“Women are not allowed,” Hideyoshi stated sternly.
“Now, why could I have guessed that for myself?” She grinned. “Then again, from what I remember, there were a lot of golf courses back in the predark times, all over the damn world, that were kind of selective about who played on their fairways and greens. You weren’t all that welcome on a mess of them if you were black or female.”
“Or if you were of the Hebrew persuasion,” Doc added. “At least, that was the case in my day.”
“You can only play here if you are at least of samurai class,” Yashimoto said. “I have played here many times and shot many eagles and birds.”
“I’ve shot plenty of blackbirds and crows in my day,” Ryan replied.
“No, you do not understand golf speech, gaijin ,” the second-in-command of the Japanese ville said.
“More like you don’t understand the American gift of irony,” Ryan replied.
As they rode by, following the trail left by the retreating ronin, the scale of the golf course became clear.
On every side of them, apart from the north, where the placid sea glittered distantly, the air was thick with layers of smoke and fumes of all different colors. But they were all the colors of darknessnot cerulean or vermilion or gold or emerald, but gray, brown, muddy orange, slime green and a hideous mustardy yellow, issuing from dozens of chimneys, factories and processing plants. The squat buildings were set at the side of filthy, slow-moving rivers, so contaminated that not even the most vile mutations could live there. One of the streams was actually burning, giving off oily smoke and a foul smell like rotten fish mixed with slurry and crusted vomit.
But gleaming amid this grossly shambolic parody of twentieth-century industrialized life, there was the golf course.
It was like a glittering jewel set in a pile of rancid excrement dark green fairways and silver sand in the bunkers, a sylvan stream running crystal-clear between the greens, with tiny scarlet flags blowing bravely.
But it was very small.
Doc scratched his forehead. “If you do not mind my asking you a question?”
“Ask away Doctor-san?” Hideyoshi said.
“What is par for the course?”
The warrior squinted up at the clouds that concealed the watery sun. “Par for the course?”
“Sure. In my day it was generally somewhere around seventy-two strokes for most of the courses. Give or take a couple of shots either way.”
“Seventy-two?”
“For eighteen holes.” Doc looked at the others. “Why am I finding it hard to communicate here? I’m not having one of my breakdowns of communication, am I? Not speaking in strangely biblical tongues of gibberish?”
“For once you’re making real good sense, Doc,” Krysty replied.
“Eighteen holes, Doctor!”
“Sure.”
The samurai stared intently at him. “This is not a foreigner joke?”
“No, it is not. A golf course has eighteen holes. Nearly every golf course in the history of the world has eighteen holes.” The penny dropped at the look of grievous disappointment on Hideyoshi’s face. Stammering, Doc added, “Of course, not all courses are coarse are eighteen holes of coarse golf. Of course they’re not. How many does yours have, pray?”
“Four,” the man muttered, eyes cast down. “Is eighteen truly the correct number for players of honor?”
Doc patted him on the back in an uncharacteristically friendly gesture, trying to cover his own embarrassment. “No, it’s not that. Depends on how much land you got. Most of the old predark courses were huge, land-devouring monsters. Sure were. By the Three Kennedys! No, you got a real pretty one here. Should be damnably proud of it, Toyotomi.”
“Truly?”
“Cross my heart and Well, just cross my heart.”
“Buteighteen holes!”
“Well, I was never that keen on hitting a bit of rubber around with a steel bar, and trying to knock it into a hole in the ground,” Doc said.
“The best that I have done for the four holes is twenty-seven hits,” the samurai said.