Каарон Уоррен - The Lowest Heaven

“You’re in debt.”

Yeah, I know that. I owe seven weeks rent on this office. Some months it’s a struggle to make the mortgage on my apartment. If I don’t renew my paperwork soon the grace period is going to run out and I won’t be licensed as a PI much longer. “You’re offering help to clear my debts?”

The Cynocephali sighs and I almost light that cigar after all.

“Not your debts. Your world’s . Our articles of agreement allow us to collect now but we’re willing to help you restructure.” He sounds like a fancy loan shark, the kind you find on Wall Street in suits and big cars. “We think you’ll like our terms.”

“Low initial interest, rising later? A little more cash to sweeten the deal?”

“No more cash,” it says, looking shocked. “You’ve had that.”

“When did we have it?” I’m getting a little cross. “You’d think we’d have noticed if we’d been borrowing from dog-headed people.”

He spun his chair, sat back and steepled his fingers. I notice he has very long nails. “When I say you,” he says. “I mean Earth.”

“Who had it?” I demand. “The Soviets?”

It looks slightly shifty for a moment. As if we’ve reached small print it’s been hoping I wouldn’t read on the back of whatever imaginary bit of paper we’re arguing about. “When I say Earth, I mean this planet, just… Not you people living on it right now.”

“So this is an old debt?”

“Oh no,” it says, “the loan hasn’t been made. Won’t be for millennia. The borrowers have just chosen an inverse interest model for financing. We’d be quite within our rights to simply collect, you know. We’re trying to help.”

“Inverse interest model?”

“You, Tito Cravelli, have a mortgage?” It looks pleased with itself for having remembered the word, or perhaps for coming up with a primitive analogy I might actually understand. “If I’ve got this right, you borrowed money, bought somewhere near here to live and will pay back the bank a much bigger amount? Now, suppose your great grandfather bought where you live for you. It would cost him much less, right? Even less if his great grandfather did it. Now imagine his great grandfather settled the debt in advance. Practically nothing.”

“To me,” I say. “To him it’s probably still a lot.”

“Well, there is that. The point is, a debt is being created and must be paid.” It’s obviously decided the time’s come to get tough.

“What do you believe we owe you?”

The Secret Service agent with a bulge bigger than me under his arm who delivered my visitor, and popped ahead to check my office was safe, had suggested I be polite and assume my visitor was serious. Very serious. When I asked what that meant he said it was, need to know◦– and I didn’t.

But then he doesn’t know what this is about. And nor do I, but I’m about to find out and for a while… Well, until my visitor goes and the Secret Service come flooding back I’ll be the only person in the world to does.

“You borrowed an extra hundred thousand years.” It shrugs. “I know, seems like nothing, but you were time critical. That extra hundred got you out of a fix and let you reclaim the tens of millions you were about to lose. So it was a good deal, really. Now we’re here to collect.”

“How can we pay you back a hundred thousand years?”

“We don’t want years,” it says. “We have a surfit of years. You can’t get rid of years for love or money. We want your moon.”

I gape at him. I’ve handled most things, from happy undertakers to honest cops, and it’s a long time since someone threw me this kind of curve ball. But for a moment I feel the room swim around me and then settle. Cars growl in the distance. The Venetian blinds are down and still dusty, my filing cabinet is still scuffed, the gash bin is still black round the inside where I tossed in a cigar and built myself an accidental bonfire. It even still smells like my office. Still, somehow, it seems to me the world’s changed.

“They offered the Moon as collateral?”

The Cynocephali nods. “You’ll cope. It will mean an end to tides. A few changes to the ocean currents. Maybe some new weather patterns…” It hesitates, then says what it was intending to say. “Obviously, the moon produces an equatorial bulge in your oceans. You’ll find water distributes to higher latitudes.” He sees my face, sighs. “Your coastline’s going to change.”

“How badly?”

“ Badly ’s a loaded word. You’ll need to redraw a few maps. We haven’t modelled this in detail but I can give you a general idea.” He pulls a slab-like device from its pocket and dances its claws across the top, before turning the slab towards me. Africa’s bigger, the western edge of Europe’s mostly islands, Japan seems to have largely disappeared. “Your night sky will be darker,” it adds. “Probably take you a while to grow used to that. And there’s that whole spin thing. Your days will probably get shorter as the earth’s rotation speeds up.”

“What’s the alternative?”

It looks at me.

“You said you had an offer I’d find irresistible. There’s nothing irresistible about losing the moon. So you must have something else in mind.”

“Well,” it says, stretching the word. “We could always fold your debt into a new one with a payment plan that works for you.” Outside, a police siren howls several streets away and I wonder if it has anything to do with this meeting. The Tenderloin’s a place the SFPD try to avoid unless they have no choice. Inside my office, the overhead fan clicks away in a language only it can understand. I have Jim Beam in my bottom drawer. A humidor that once belonged to a Mexican gangster on my desk. I desperately want a cigar or a shot, preferably both, but the thing’s waiting for my reaction.

“Lay the new deal out for me,” I say.

“We take the Sun instead.”

I gape at the creature for a second time. It seems perfectly serious.

“It’s a good deal. You get to keep the Moon now and we come back later to take the Sun. I can’t offer fairer than that.”

“How much later?”

Reaching for its pad, it taps and the screen comes up with a number that, were it on a cheque, would make Wall Street dizzy with delight. If we’re talking years that’s a long long time from now. “The way to think of this,” it says, “is the future sold you out. So have to protect yourself, and the easiest way to do that is take up my offer. In fact, sign now and I’ll throw in a bonus.” It grins. “Jupiter.”

My face probably says it all.

“Largest of the gas giants? 500,000,000 odd miles away, two and a half times the mass of all the other planets in your system put together? Third brightest object in your sky?” For a split second the dog-head looks like a sulky child who’s done the wrong homework.

“What about Jupiter?”

“Just for you, just because I like you… when we do come to take the Sun, we’ll shift the Earth into a new orbit around Jupiter before we do anything else. Well, we’ll turn Jupiter into a little sun for you first, or there’d be no point moving you, would there?”

This is the point I help myself to a whisky, and listen to three minutes of small talk as it pretends to give me time to think about its offer while talking enough to ensure that isn’t possible. All the same, inside myself I know I like this deal. As some time, in the impossibly far future, we’ll give up the Sun. In return, we ‘d keep the Moon now; and, as a bonus prize, they’ll relocate the planet for us and throw in a new sun to keep us warm before they take the old one. But I don’t want it to know I’m keen.

“Yeah, right,” I say. “Like any of that’s even possible.”