Judge Sn Goes Golfing
Date: 2009-12-31 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Humour; Fantasy
Description: John Scalzi visits the universe of his bestselling novel The Android's Dream for this exclusive short story, featuring fan favorite character Judge Nugan Bufan Sn -- a brilliant alien jurist whose misanthropy and lack of social graces is matched only by his futile, unrequited for the game of golf. When he hits the links at the abysmal Dulles Woods golf course, the unexpected happens: He begins to play well. But there are more hazards on the course for Sn than just sand traps and disaffected caddies… Long a staple of Scalzi's live readings, "Judge Sn Goes Golfing" has never seen print until now
Publisher: Subterranean Press

John Scalzi

Illustrated by Gahan Wilson

Judge Sn Goes Golfing Copyright © 2009 by John Scalzi.

All rights reserved.

Cover and interior illustrations Copyright © 2009 by Gahan Wilson.

All rights reserved.

Interior design Copyright © 2009 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

All rights reserved.

Electronic Edition

ISBN

9781596064799

Subterranean Press

PO Box 190106

Burton, MI 48519
www.subterraneanpress.com

Judge Sn’s assassination was getting in the way of his golf game.

It was just that sort of day. Judge Bufan Nigun Sn had been reamed into consciousness at five a.m. by his alarm clock, which was programmed to whack him on the head with its little arms. “Get up get up get up get up!” it exclaimed, in ever louder and more excitable tones. Sn swung at it and missed as it rolled out of his reach; the clock’s adaptive evasive programming had learned this trick. It also avoided the heavy tome of recent significant Common Confederation Court rulings which was then flung at it; that was another favorite tactic of Sn’s.

Sn finally stood, wobbly; the clock came up to him and with the same little plastic arms that had been lightly pummeling him, now squeezed one of his legs in a hug. “Now you’re up!” it said, in pleased tones. Sn kicked it mightily and gained satisfaction as it fragmented against the wall. It was programmed to do that too, of course, and after a couple of seconds it began pulling itself together, humming as it did so, while Sn staggered off to the shower. The mobile alarm clock had been a gag gift from one of Sn’s clerks, who was well aware of his boss’s inability to get up after a night of drinking, and confused Sn’s sarcastic nature with Sn having a sense of humor about himself. The clerk learned of his misapprehension when Sn fired him while the gift was still partially unwrapped; however, in the fullness of time Sn had to admit it actually did get his ass up in the mornings, especially Wednesday mornings like this, when he woke early for his weekly golf pilgrimage.

Twenty minutes, one shower and one hangover pill later, Sn was out the door and into the cab of his shitty Ford. “Good morning,” the Ford said, in its customary greeting.

“Suck it,” Sn said in his.

The Ford, neither intelligent nor programmed for complex emotional modeling, accepted the greeting with its usual lack of complaint. “Where will we be going today?” it asked.

“Dulles Woods Municipal Golf Course,” Sn said.

“Do you wish to drive?” the Ford asked.

“Absolutely not,” Sn said.

“All right,” said the Ford. “I’ve checked road conditions, which are good. It should take us forty minutes to reach Dulles Woods Municipal Golf Course.”

“Shut up and drive,” Sn said, and leaned back into his seat as the Ford pulled out of his garage and headed for the 66.

Sn hated Dulles Woods with a passion that smoldered like a trash fire. Dulles Woods was built on Tarmac and graft, the former provided by the portion of the former Dulles International Airport upon which Dulles Woods was placed, and the latter by the Loudoun Country supervisors who thought up the golf course largely as way to skim public funds, building the course through rigged single bid contracts to friends and relatives. During their fraud trials it was discovered that the runway paving had never been torn up and only a thin layer of topsoil had been placed on it, which explained how the Dulles Woods fairways could be simultaneously patchy and swampy. It was also discovered that “Lee Amsterdam,” the allegedly celebrated course designer, was a nephew of one of the supervisors with no previous course design experience; under oath he revealed the course was designed by taking holes from the courses he found on a PlayStation-era Tiger Woods video game. This resulted in Loudoun County being sued by Pebble Beach, Cog Hill and St. Andrews, not only for stealing from their courses, but for doing it so poorly that it damaged the original courses’ reputations.

Poorly-designed, dingy and ill-kept, a victim of the decaying tax base of Loudoun Country, Dulles Woods was the veritable ass end shit hole of golf. Sn believed that calling it the worst golf course in a hundred mile radius of Washington, DC was not sufficient; in his opinion it was the worst golf course east of the Mississippi River, and only Judge Sn’s certain knowledge of the existence of God’s Love Creationism Golf Course and Museum thirty three miles outside of Flagstaff Arizona, complete with scripture-bellowing caddy/docents to throw off one’s game, kept Dulles Woods from taking the crown for the whole of the United States. Even then it was a close call; God’s Love had a sweet par four 6th hole, marred only by the dinosaur-riding caveman sculpture that edged onto the fairway and seemed like a holy magnet for golf balls. Sn hit the sculpture three times in three rounds; after the third time, Sn’s caddy/docent snickered and muttered something about predestination. Sn then exercised free will by clobbering the caddy with his driver; this earned the caddy a comfortable settlement and Sn a lifetime expulsion from God’s Love.

It was not the first time Sn had found himself on the wrong side of the clubhouse door. Indeed, this was why, with the sky yellowing in the east, Sn found himself grimly trooping toward Virginia in the first place. Dulles Woods was a shit hole of a course, all right, but it was also the only golf course in the metropolitan Washington, DC area Sn hadn’t been banned from. Every other course, public and private, had made it known to Sn that despite his fame and acclaim as a fast-rising star in the Common Confederation judicial firmament—normally enough to make one welcome at any golf course in this famously politically-obsessed town—his temper and his temperament made him persona non grata. Basically, Sn was an asshole, and never more so than on the fairway.

Sn stewed in his car, letting it steer itself down the 66/267 interchange, recalling each expulsion in turn. At Rock Creek he got into a philosophical argument with an appeals court judge that ended with Sn chasing his fellow jurist around the 5th hole green, his putter swinging like a cudgel. On the Red course of Army Navy, and after a few too many pre-game whiskey sours, he’d told the US Chief of Staff just how many war crimes the Admiral ought to have been hauled up for over the last decade. At Bethesda he’d vomited into the punchbowl during a fundraiser for a local Congressional representative; Sn argued that this indiscretion shouldn’t get him banned from the course, just the clubhouse, but to no avail. At Raspberry Falls he insisted on playing a round of golf while a local charity ran a petting zoo on the grounds; a particularly solid tee shot brained a runaway lamb that had wandered onto the fairway. The lamb braining and Sn’s subsequent and profane tirade over the corpse of the wee, fluffy animal took place in full view of six horrified youngsters, including the grandson of the governor of Virginia. He told his dad, who told his dad, who called Sn, who called the governor a goddamned Virginia ham. That was that for Raspberry Falls.

Eventually private clubs Sn had never even been to made it known to their members he was not to be invited. When Sn first heard of this he had stomped into the office of his lawyer, and demanded to sue.

“On what grounds?” David Stern, his lawyer, had asked.

“Racial discrimination,” Sn said.

“Are the clubs banning other non-humans from golfing at their clubs?” Stern asked.

“No,” Sn admitted.

“And they’re not banning other Wryg,” Stern said, naming Sn’s particular species.

“No,” Sn said. In fact, Grun Se Fer, the Wryg ambassador to Earth, was famously nearly always to be found on the links at Lansdowne, a club which had distributed Sn’s picture to its gate security after an unfortunate incident involving a 5-iron and a caddy’s left tibia.

“So it’s really just about you,” Stern said. “That’s not racial discrimination. That’s Bufan Nigan Sn discrimination. That’s entirely legal.”

“There’s got to be something you can do,” Sn had said.

“Not really, but there’s something you can do,” Stern said. “Stop being such an asshole when you golf.”

“You’re fired,” Sn said.

Stern sighed. He’d already been fired twice in the last three months; the firings, alas, never stuck. “Look,” he said. “I don’t mind that you’re an asshole on the links. I make a good living preparing your settlements and keeping you out of jail and keeping you from getting removed from your judicial seat. It keeps my paralegals busy. And I know better than to go golfing with you. But this really is just about you. There’s no legal relief when people don’t want you on their private property because you’re a jerk. You’ve just got to stop being a jerk.”

Sn mulled this. “Public courses can’t ban me preemptively,” he said.

“No they can’t,” Stern agreed. “You’re free to golf on any public course until you do something disruptive and stupid, at which point they have the legal right to ban you.”

“Then I won’t do anything disruptive and stupid,” Sn said.

“Good,” Stern said. “I’ll tell my paralegals they can have the afternoon off.”

Six months and two settlements later, there was no public course within driving distance of Washington, DC where Sn was allowed to golf—except Dulles Woods. Long abandoned by any golfer who could choose not to golf there, Dulles Woods was the golf course of last resort, populated by duffers who, like Sn, had found themselves banned or shunned elsewhere. At Dulles Woods, Sn found a measure of peace. He was not the worst-tempered golfer there by a long drive; in fact, he was comfortably in the middle of Dulles Woods rage management bell curve. Sn recalled two months previous, watching two members of a foursome in front of him getting tasered by the Loudoun County sheriffs for assaulting each other and then resisting arrest. Sn had never once been tasered, nor had he ever resisted arrest. He felt pride in his relative social advancement. And he had diplomatic immunity anyway.

Sn noticed his Ford had slowed to a crawl, as had the rest of traffic, even though Sn was ostensibly going against the morning rush into DC. He asked the car what the shit was going on.

“Traffic accident,” the Ford said. Sn clicked his mouth-pieces in irritation. Sn hated drivers who felt they could drive better than their cars could on their own; they ended up screwing everybody else, especially him. Sn needed to be in his office by 10, and he was cutting it close as it was. This was just going to make things worse. Sn thought back wistfully on the days when he used the Court’s popper to get to Dulles Woods; it arced him over the ground traffic and had him on the links not more than ten minutes after it took off from the CC court’s popper pad. That ended when the Court’s executive manager reminded Sn that the popper was meant for official and essential use only, such as couriering documents from one CC district courthouse to another. Sn made what he thought was an excellent argument why his weekly golf sojourn qualified as both official and essential; the EM was not notably moved. Sn considered getting her fired but she was too well-connected. He had to use ground transportation like a common troll.

Sn’s Ford eventually passed the accident; the driver rammed into the divider and then pinged across four lanes of traffic. Sn noted the offending car’s license plate. If he missed his tee time he’d be having one of his clerks run a records check on the son of a bitch by noon.

He did not miss his tee time; the Ford rolled into Dulles Woods’ weedy parking lot with six minutes to spare. Sn hauled his clubs out the Ford’s trunk and made his way to the automated check-in, which confirmed his tee time and charged Sn an outrageous amount to play on the course, far in excess of what a round of golf at Dulles Woods was worth. The course could get away with it because it knew its golfers couldn’t golf anywhere else, otherwise they would. Sn clicked his mouthpieces in irritation once more and then headed to the cart rental as quickly as he could. Dulles Woods only had three carts for rental on a good day, and two of them had issues. Sn hoped the good one had not been rented.

It hadn’t, the reason being that sometime in the night someone had stolen its fuel cell, and the fuel cells of the other carts as well. Somewhere on Route 7 a piece of shit car was chugging into work on a jury-rigged power source. Sn swore and stomped around to the back of the automated check-in, where the illegal caddies hung out.

At some point along the way, it became known to the locals that Dulles Woods’ golf carts were unreliable, and that the course’s golfers, while foul-tempered and more than occasionally abusive, would also pay a day’s wage not to have to carry their own clubs. Thus every morning a small group of local unemployed lined up behind the automated check-in, rubbing their hands to keep warm in the dewy chill and waiting for one of the golfers to choose them with an imperious crook of a finger. Dulles Woods didn’t sanction the caddies; it officially discouraged them and occasionally would have the sheriff’s deputies come in and mutter something to them about loitering. But by and large it let them be because it discovered a way to monetize them—it simply ruled that no one could walk the fairways without paying the greens and usage fees. The golfers who used the caddies ended up paying two greens fees plus whatever they paid the caddies directly. There was a reason why Dulles Woods had only three golf carts, two of which were always in serious disrepair.

Usually there were four or five erstwhile caddies hanging around the back of the check-in; this morning Sn found only one. “Where’s Evgenyi?” Sn asked the guy; Evgenyi was a recent immigrant from Russia who Sn preferred as a caddy because he knew enough to shut up and stay out of Sn’s way. Evgenyi knew Sn’s golfing schedule and was generally there when Sn stomped up.

The man stared at Sn as if not comprehending; Sn asked again and then once more before remembering that he’d forgotten to turn on the translation device he had hung on a lanyard. Sn spoke perfect English but did it at a frequency which only occasionally dropped into the range of human hearing; this came in handy if Sn wanted to chew out someone without them knowing, provided he remembered to turn off the device, which he often did not. Once it was on, it was on all day. Sn testily flipped on the translation device now and asked his question for a fourth time.

The guy shrugged. “Haven’t seen anyone else,” he said.

Sn allowed himself a brief and uncharacteristic moment to wonder if Evgeniy might not be feeling well, then reminded himself the two of them had not made sort of goddamned lifetime commitment to each other. “Well, come on,” Sn said to the new guy. The two went around the front of the check-in, where Sn paid the caddy’s fees, shoved his bag into the guy’s arms, and then stomped off in the direction of the course.

The first hole at Dulles Woods was inspired by the same hole on the Old Course at St. Andrews, a 376 yard, par 4 with a small water hazard bordering the green. But where St. Andrews had the venerable Swilcan Burn, Dulles Woods had a plastic-lined ditch which was supposed to have been filled with koi but ended up with mosquitoes and mats of algae instead. Sn was not bothered by mosquitoes—they didn’t like the way he tasted—but he felt some existential angst about the fact that the rate he alienated golf courses he would be unlikely ever to play at St. Andrews. Sn shook it off, placed his tee and his ball, called for his driver and then angrily snatched it from the bag when the caddy apparently couldn’t read the fucking number right on the goddamn head. Sn cleared his thoughts, visualized where he wanted the ball to go, and took a mighty swing.

The ball took off from the tee like a shot, lofted in the air like a dizzy, trembling quail, and then landed gorgeously, beautifully and perfectly, just where Sn had wanted it to go, precisely positioned for the approach to the green.

Sn stood there, stunned. He turned to his caddy. “Did you see that shot?” he asked. The caddy shrugged. Sn jammed the driver back into the bag, irritated, and tromped off down the fairway, not looking back to see if the caddy was following.

The simple fact of the matter was that despite his love of the game of golf, Judge Bufan Nigan Sn was bad at it. And not just garden variety bad, or even unusually or exceptionally bad. He was, in fact, historically bad at it, the sort of bad that beggars description and becomes it own unique and soul-destroying thing. Sn’s two-decade affair with the sport of golf—begun in the first year of his posting on Earth, when that first metallic ping of ball meeting metal resonated inside of him, quivering his internal organs with an intensity that was very nearly sexual—had been one of aggravation and futility. Sn had been a persistent suitor, wooing the sport with a series of lessons and seminars, new and improved clubs, heads, shafts and grips, and endless variations of the golf ball, all promising better, smoother flight characteristics and accuracy off the club head. The sport was not moved; indeed, the sport was spiteful. After two decades, Sn still held the maximum handicap for his sex and species allowed by the USGA.

Tim Pratt, the golf pro he’d hired some years back to improve his game, tried to explain to Sn why it was unlikely he was going to get much better. “Your body’s just not designed for golf,” Tim had said, and pointed to Sn’s arms. “Your limbs aren’t as naturally strong as human arms are, and they don’t have the same vertical freedom of movement because your body shape gets in the way. We can improve your game a little, but you’re never going to get your handicap down to something that humans have, or that a Nidu golfer has.”

“Burtab Shi Pou plays without a handicap,” Sn said.

“Pou is the Wyrg version of Ben Hogan or Willy Gross,” Tim said. “He’s a once in a generation phenomenon. You, on the other hand, are a middle-aged judge with a bad swing even when we factor in your physiology. Let’s try to keep a sense of perspective.”

Where’s your sense of perspective now, Pratt? Sn wondered, as the ball lifted from the fairway and sailed, smooth and silky, through the morning air, to land on the green mere yards from the cup. It was a rhetorical question; Tim Pratt was dead, a victim of putting into holes he’d been best advised to steer clear of and having been shot by a jealous husband because of it. Being a golf pro had its dangers. But the essence of the question was relevant, Sn thought, as he chipped his ball into the hole and took out his scorecard to mark off the first birdie in his long, frustrating personal history of the sport. Golf, heretofore a reluctant mistress, had suddenly and quite unexpectedly let him get her top off.

What it was, Sn realized, as he went par for the next two holes and registered another birdie (!) on the fourth hole, was Dulles Woods itself. Long banned from all other courses, Sn had been forced to learn every hateful nook and cranny of this fetid course; every boggy fairway, every scummed-over water hazard, every sand trap infested with cat feces and raccoon corpses. Having exhausted almost every conceivable combination of shots on every hole of the course, Sn could choose the right club in every circumstance without needing time to think or plan. His knowledge of this one shitty course was in its way as extensive as his knowledge of Common Confederation law—and perhaps even greater, since he did not revisit the same laws every single week like he revisited the same links here. Dulles Woods, in all its feculent glory, had steeped into him, into every orifice and pore and spicule, until it became part of him, like a skin tab or an intestinal polyp: benign but not exactly healthy either.

No matter. Existential skin tab or not, as Sn conquered the course, maintaining an even and satisfying par, he began to feel something lift from his soul, something that he did not know had been there, something that he would not have been able to name until this very game of golf: A secret feeling of personal inadequacy that had sucked down into Sn’s very core. Sn—somewhat atypically for a Wyrg—had risen above his lower-class station on the Wyrgian colony world of Fului to become one of the most influential Wryg jurists in the Common Confederation. It was true that a posting on Earth wasn’t very noteworthy in itself; it was one of the lower-tier judicial postings, and the best someone like Sn could do, coming into the judiciary as he did from a minor colony and without connections of any sort. But it was here on this little backwater planet that Sn had decided Nidu v. United Nations of Earth, a sovereignty ruling on a newly-discovered, manufactured sentient species—in this case a species made of human and sheep genes—that did something almost unheard of in a legal system that had existed for ten of thousands of years: Opened up an entire new branch of law.

Well, more like an entire new stub of law; the law in the field applied only to a single person in the entire Common Confederation. But theoretically, it was huge. Sn had become a legal sensation and capitalized on it shamelessly to advance his position in the CC judicial hierarchy. He was still stuck on Earth—indeed, thanks to the ruling he was indelibly connected to it in the CC legal world’s consciousness. But if the whispers were to be believed, Sn was being considered a dark horse candidate for The High Castle—the informal name of the Common Confederation Executive Court—when two of the eleven seats were to open up through mandatory retirements later this year. That would be a coup worth having; the first Wyrg judge at The High Castle in almost six hundred years.

But for all the fame and notoriety that Sn had heaped upon him (and which he enthusiastically shoveled on himself), in his small and compact heart were dark questions of his fundamental worthiness, in itself the wellspring of his ambition and attitude. Through force of will Sn had beaten back every challenge to his competence and ability, until that fateful day more than twenty years back when he first stepped up to a tee, swung his club, and had the club fly out of his hands and strike the senior member of his foursome, knocking the man unconscious and into the hospital for six stitches and overnight observation. Golf had ever defeated him—ever mocked him—ever reminded him that all his competence and flair for the law, all the fame and notoriety that accrued because of it, was but a thin, sweet candy shell over a dark and bitter liqueur of inadequacy. Golf would not let Sn forget that fundamentally, he sucked.

As Sn recorded another miraculous birdie, he realized now how this constant reminder of his internal failures had poisoned him over the years—not in the stewardship of law, but in everything else. He now knew why he fired his clerks at the slightest whim and why his relationships with his peers at the CC District Court were strained. He now understood why none of his three marriages lasted more than a single breeding cycle. He realized why it was his children had been sullen during their court-ordered visitations while young and cut off all communication when they became adults. And, most of all, now he comprehended why he had to be banned from every other golf course in the Washington, DC area: because in the end, Dulles Woods—shitty, inadequate Dulles Woods—was not only a golf course, but a map of the abscessed topography of his own soul. Dulles Woods was who he was inside; not only had it steeped into him, he had steeped into it, a mutual feculence, like understanding like.

And so it was, there on the 11th hole of Dulles Woods—copped from Pebble Beach, with the ocean view replaced by a view of the ground traffic snarled up on Route 28—that Judge Bufan Nigun Sn experienced a shock of personal enlightenment that was, in its way, as profound as any experienced by any sentient creature at any time in the history of the Common Confederation. It was like Saul on the road to Damascas, Buddah under the mangrove tree, Cu-ki-go trawling for kroons at the shore of the Shaden Sea, or the Grinch discovering that his heart grew three sizes that day. Sn saw with crystal clarity the flaws in his makeup and the places where he was being healed with this miraculous and epic round of golf, this gift to himself, accomplished only through complete understanding, and pointing the way to his personal redemption and his inevitable greatness through service to the Common Confederation and the universe. That this moment happened with a Titleist Forged 695MB 7-iron in his hand, in the presence of a disaffected caddy, on a course that smelled of decomposing tar and deer urine, mattered not in the least. As Sn carded the 11th hole—par—he knew he had been given the opportunity to remake his life.

On the 12th hole—one over—he vowed to make amends to those he had treated ill over the course of his career as a Common Confederation judge.

On the 13th hole—par—he became determined to apologize to his wives for being cold and distant during their marriages. He swore to mend relations with his children and earn the love he’d withheld from them and that they now withheld from him.

On the 14th hole—par—he decided that he’d tip the caddy, even though the fellow was largely fucking useless.

On the 15th hole—birdie!—he knew that he must become an advocate not only of the law but of justice, and must use his position as judge to effect that change, to become the engine that powered the whole of the Common Confederation into a better era.

It was in this haze of self-redemption and spiritual rehabilitation that Sn came to what he knew would be the greatest challenge in his personal journey to wellness: Dulles Wood’s infamous 16th hole.

It was the 16th hole, as it happened, that had tipped off the observant to the fact that course designer “Lee Amsterdam” had his head well up his fraudulent ass. Bored with nicking fairways and greens from a video game, Amsterdam was determined to design one hole himself, based, as Amsterdam (real name: Joel Schlotzky) related in court, on a favorite miniature golf hole he played as a child. It was a boa constrictor of a fairway that curved back on itself, featured immense grassy hills at each curve (intended, Amsterdam said, to ricochet balls off of, just like miniature golf) and a series of hooked water traps that turned 50 yards of the fairway into a near impassible maze. At 890 yards, it wasn’t the longest hole in the history of golf, but it was definitely the most poorly designed. USGA regulations did not recognize pars of more than six; most golfers at Dulles Woods were happy if they managed to card an eight on the hole, cursing Amsterdam as they did so.

As if to reflect its shame, the 16th hole was a slogging walk from the 15th hole and from the rest of the course, isolated and hidden inside a deep collection of fast-growing pine that edged onto the fairway itself, presenting its own challenge for golfers and serving to muffle the agonized shouts of the frustrated and angry players. Rumor had it that enough drivers, irons and putters had been flung into the pines over the years that an ambitious person might collect several complete sets of clubs.

Sn turned to his caddy as they stepped up to the tee. “What do you think?” he said, to the man. “Driver? 3 wood? 8 iron? Sand wedge?”

The caddy appeared to sense he was being mocked. “I just carry your clubs,” he said, a little miffed.

“You’re doing a fine job of that,” Sn said, attempting not to be snotty but not quite managing the trick. This new area of personal grace was going to be difficult. “Hand me the driver. No, that one,” he said. The caddy handed over the club. Sn turned from the caddy, set his tee, and collected his thoughts. Sn had never gotten out of the 16th hole of Dulles Woods with anything less than a fifteen—a nonuple bogey, as one of his playing partners dubbed it shortly before Sn drove the golf cart over his foot—and had never left the 16th hole without feeling like he wanted either a drink or to fire someone. The last two holes of Dulles Woods were cake—an easy par four and a par three—but Sn had always thrashed his way through them; the 16th hole invariably sucked all the life out of him and his game.

Not today, Sn thought. Today was a day of science and magic; Sn knew where to hit the ball to land it on the fairway at just the right spot to make a diagonal shot through the backtrack. It was a risky shot over a rise, and Sn wouldn’t be able to see where the ball would fall—but today he knew where it would land. Then just the right speed, angle and iron would lift it over the water maze. From there, a short shot onto the green, and then a solid putt into the cup. Five strokes for a birdie on the hole.

He could see it. He could imagine it. And today of all days, he knew he could do it. Sn set his tee, placed his ball, and with a supreme confidence that he had never before felt on any golf course, swung back and prepared to deliver his mighty, redemptive shot.

After Sn had tumbled to the ground he spent the next few seconds trying to reconstruct what the hell had just happened. At the top of his swing, Sn felt his golf club wrenching itself from his grip, as if a cruel and capricious god had flicked it away, and Sn felt some of the muscles in both of his arms stretch and possibly tear as the club launched itself up and back, spinning around its circle of gravity. Sn himself, thrown off balance, spun awkwardly backwards, spraining one of his wrists as he automatically reached out to hold back the planet that was swinging itself toward him. Sn had to replay the scene in his head three times before he finally grasped the sequence of events. He still didn’t know how it happened.

Sn heard a gasping sound to the right; still prone, he looked over and saw his caddy was on the ground, rocking back and forth and clutching his neck with his hand. Blood was filling the spaces between his fingers and dripping slowly to the ground. Sn crawled over to his caddy and placed his own hand on the man’s hand. “Let me look,” he said. His caddy didn’t respond, but allowed Sn to move his hand. As he did, something small and flat fell the short distance to the ground: A deformed bullet.

“Son of a bitch,” Sn said. Now it made sense: Someone shot at him, hit his club instead, and the ricochet hit the poor bastard caddy in the neck.

Sn got a closer look at the wound. “You’re all right,” Sn said, to the caddy. “It’s just a flesh wound.” The caddy groaned and lost consciousness just as a spray of dirt pelted them both; whoever had shot at Sn was still doing it. Sn crawled back away from the caddy, dragging his fallen bag of clubs with him as a shield. There was a whine as another bullet whistled by, and several others cracked overhead. Sn hunkered down and felt an emotion well up inside of him; not fear, but another emotion entirely. Pure rage.

Presently a man-shaped shadow covered Sn; he looked up to see a wild-haired young human male pointing a handgun at him. The gun was shaking a bit.

“Judge Bufan Nigun Sn, I sentence you death,” the man said, nervously. The quaver in his voice enraged Sn even more; he was clearly being assassinated by an amateur, here.

“You stupid shit,” Sn said. “Can’t you see that I’m in the middle of my round?”

The young man paused, uncertain. “Judge Bufan Nigun Sn,” he started again.

Sn waved him to silence. “I heard that part already,” Sn said. “Why are you trying to kill me? Or do I not get to know why I’m sentenced to die?”

“I was getting to that!” the guy snapped. “You interrupted me.”

“Oh, well, I apologize,” Sn said. “So sorry to put you off your schedule.”

The man blinked and swallowed; clearly this assassination was not going as he had planned. “Judge Bufan Nigun Sn, I sentence you death, because of the crime you committed against the planet Earth in the Lawson ruling,” he said, gun still trained, more or less, on Sn.

“Lawson?” Sn asked, incredulous. Lawson v. Abernathy had been a basic land rights case where there had been a potential conflict between UNE law and Common Confederation statutes. Sn had overruled the UNE ruling but sent it back to the lower court with new instructions; he’d placed a stay on implementing the ruling until the lower court had a chance to take it up again. “Holy God, man! There’s not a goddamn thing in Lawson that’s worth killing me over,” Sn said, and then pointed at his unconscious caddy. “Hell, there’s nothing in Lawson worth killing him over, either! And I’m goddamn sure there was nothing in Lawson worth keeping me from playing this round of golf!”

“Lawson wasn’t just about land rights, it was about the environment,” the man said, and then stopped. Sn waited, somewhat impatiently, for the continuation of the jack-assed reasoning behind that statement, and kept waiting up until the point that the man coughed, drooled blood out of his mouth, and pitched forward, dead. Sn moved out of the way as the young man fell and saw a red splotch on the back on the man’s shirt; someone had shot him in the back. Was that aimed at him or at me? Sn wondered, and got an answer less than a second later when the grass next to him spouted up as another shot missed him by inches. Sn dived back down behind his golf bag, but then peered over it a few seconds later, the fear of his second assassin overcome by curiosity.

The assassin was another man, this one somewhat more professional looking than the unkempt previous assassin. This one walked toward the tee purposefully, scoped rifle cradled in his arms. Sn wondered why someone with a sighted rifle would bother closing in on him, then figured it out: Like the first assassin, he had a message to deliver before he killed Sn. So he did intentionally kill the first guy, in order to make sure Sn wasn’t killed before he had an opportunity to deliver his spiel. The second shot likewise intentionally missed Sn, to keep him contained until this new assassin could get to him and plug him up close and personal.

Sn wondered if this was about Lawson, too; if he’d known it was going to cause him so much trouble he would have assigned it to Judge Kort. He never liked Kort anyway.

“Fuck this,” Sn said, and stood up. If this new assassin was waiting to kill him in order to deliver a dogmatic spiel first, Sn was damned if he was going to hear it prostrate on the ground. The assassin trained his rifle on Sn the moment he stood up but held his fire, walking slowly as he advanced on the judge. The assassin was intent enough on keeping Sn in his rifle sights that he was not aware that some thirty yards behind him, another man had emerged out of the pines to the right, his own rifle in hand, trained on the second assassin. Sn, in spite of himself and against all sense, pointed at the new guy and shouted at the second assassin to look out.

Even more incredibly the second assassin listened, turning just in time to catch a bullet in the arm from the third assassin. The second assassin’s rifle fell to the ground but he remained standing, reaching to his waist with his uninjured arm and hand to pull out a handgun which he trained on the third assassin, thereby missing the appearance of a fourth man, who materialized out of the pines to the left of Sn. With his own automatic rifle this new threat stitched the second assassin’s back, neck and head full of metal. The second assassin slumped, and the two remaining assassins began shooting at each other across the length of the fairway. Sn started, agog, too stunned to move, watching the two men shoot and run, run and shoot.

Finally, a thought struck Sn: Shit, they’re coming right at me. Sn dove back down to the ground to avoid stray bullets. Running wasn’t an option; Sn didn’t want to present a target. He had no idea if either of these two planned to monologue before offing him. On the ground Sn searched around for the handgun the first assassin had trained on him, lo those many seconds ago. He found it not far from where the man had fallen; he grabbed it, and remembering a long-past weekend shooting firearms with some district attorneys of his acquaintance, checked the gun’s magazine.

It was empty. Sn’s vision clouded with rage. That little shitball had wasted his ammo and had held an empty fucking gun on him. Sn could have killed him, if the second assassin hadn’t already done it.

All other thoughts were delayed as Sn looked back up and saw that his two new assassins were making a beeline toward him, converging on the point where he was. Both the assassins had long dropped their guns, having expended all their ammunition trying to hit each other and failing. Whichever of the two was going to kill him was going to do it up close and personal. It was too late to run; the two men were too close. Sn grabbed his golf bag and heaved it in their general direction, extracting the 3 wood as he did so.

Ten seconds later Sn and the two assassins each had a golf club in hand and were eying each other warily, each watching the other two for sudden movement.

“Look,” Sn said, slowly after a minute of everyone not moving. Somehow through all this his translation device had stayed around his neck. “All I want to do is play this hole.”

One of the assassins, brown-haired where the other was blond, actually grinned at this, though he kept his defensive stance. “That’s nice,” he said. “You have four people trying to kill you at the same time, and you’re thinking about your golf game.”

“Yes,” Sn said, and was stunned to hear the utter sincerity in his voice, coming through the translation device. “I need to finish this hole. It’s important. I don’t expect you to understand.”

“Hey, sorry,” the blond assassin said. “But the fact is, after I deal with this guy, I have to kill you. There are other people on the course by now. I don’t have time to let you finish your round.”

“But why?” Sn asked. “What have I done to piss you off?”

“It’s not personal,” the blond said. “I got thrown this gig the other day.”

“Whatever you’re being paid, I’ll match it,” Sn said. “I need to finish this round.”

“Doesn’t work like that,” the blond said. “And anyway, are you going to pay him off, too?” he motioned at the brown-haired assassin.

“Actually, I have no objection to being paid off,” said the brown-haired assassin.

“What?” said the blond. He seemed honestly shocked.

“This is just a freelance gig,” the brown-haired one said, to the blond. “It’s not one of my regular clients. I don’t care if I burn him. I can just say others got here before I did and made it impossible to take the shot.”

“Right,” Sn said. “And it’s true, which makes it an even better story.” Sn pointed to the blond assassin, who was still incredulous. “And that way you don’t have to try to kill him first to get to me.”

“That’s a good point,” said the brown-haired assassin. “I didn’t think of it that way. Although now I guess I could charge you to kill him, instead of just killing him for free.”

Sn turned to the blond assassin. “I’d rather just pay you not to kill me than to pay him to kill you,” he said. “That’s a felony.”

“This assumes he’s going to be able to kill me before I kill you,” the blond one said.

“Well, now it’s two against one,” the brown-haired assassin said.

“Hey, shut up,” the blond assassin said, clearly irritated, to the brown-haired assassin. “You. You’re an embarrassment. You take a job, you stick with a job.”

The brown-haired assassin shrugged. “I just want to get paid,” he said.

The blond looked at the brown-haired assassin like a bug, and then turned to Sn. “This golf game is really that important to you,” he said.

“Oh, yes,” Sn said. “Yes. Please.”

The blond assassin stared at Sn for a hard moment. Then he sighed. “I want to register my strenuous objection to this situation,” he said.

“Noted,” Sn said, the gladness rising in his heart. It looked like he would be able to finish the round after all. Finish it and redeem his soul. The cost, whatever it was, would be cheap by comparison.

“This goes against everything I stand for as an ethical businessman,” the blond assassin said. “However, given the situation,” the blond’s exposition was drowned out by a loud bang and then halted when a sucking chest wound took away his capacity to speak. He collapsed.

Sn whirled toward the brown-haired assassin as a second bang went off, and caught him in the act of flying backward, a grievous wound in his forehead squirting blood and gray matter into the air. Sn continued his turn to see his caddy, conscious now, holding a large caliber handgun.

“What did you just do?” Sn said.

“Judge Bufan Nigun Sn, I strike a blow for the racial purity of the Earth,” the caddy said, and leveled his gun at Sn. “For great justice…”

Sn bellowed in pure, insensate rage and struck the caddy in the temple with the 3 wood. The caddy collapsed, arm falling sideways across his body as his hand reflexively pulled the trigger. The bullet entered the caddy’s lung, pulping it, before blowing out the ninth thoracic vertebrae, killing the man instantly. Judge Sn stood there for several minutes, 3 wood at ready, just in case anyone else suddenly reanimated.

Eventually Sn became aware of someone speaking to him. He looked up and saw a foursome of golfers standing at the edge of the tee.

“What?” Sn said.

“Jesus Christ,” said one of the golfers, and looked up at Sn. “What the hell is going on here?”

“What does it look like?” Sn said. “I’m playing golf.” And with that he turned, dug through his bag for a new ball and tee, found a spot that was not covered by blood or a dead body, and while the new foursome watched, disbelieving, set the tee and lined up his shot.

He swung.

The ball shanked hard to the left, disappearing forever into the woods.

“Fuck!” Sn said, and collapsed into the grass.

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Judge Sn Goes Golfing