For Sophia,
Prologue
An Angel flew through the dark blue sky between the stars, heading for a planet no other Angel1 had visited for years. This was a tiny world in a faraway corner of one of the smallest universes in the cosmos. It was a long way away from the center of heaven, so she had plenty of time to contemplate her plan. The other Angels were appalled when she told them what she meant to do. They had long since given up on the place themselves and left it to the Enemy. Why not? It was so ugly. Angels dislike ugliness. They see no point in it.
Once the planet had been a beautiful one, blue and green and white and gold. But now it was mean and shabby: brown and gray and pinched looking, half-hidden under a yellow haze. As the Angel drew closer, she could see the grid of concrete and tarmac streets that covered it, not only on land, but on what had once been seas, canyons, mountains—even icebergs. She winced at this, at the waste and fecklessness and sheer stupidity the landscape showed. She wondered at the Enemy. He delighted in just this kind of ugliness and confusion, but as an Angel, of course, she couldn’t understand why.
She had long since given up trying to understand what possible pleasure the Enemy2 could take in the misery and degradation of the many peoples under his rule. He took it—that was enough. She wouldn’t worry about why. She would just fight.
She would fight, she thought. And she would choose the battleground, not him. She had lost to him once, when she had made the mistake of letting him choose. Angels do not like to lose. Nothing can kill an Angel, of course, but nothing is more painful to one than the triumphant laugh of the Enemy.
This Angel had heard that laugh. She would hear it for Eternity. This was why she was determined, now, to fight—and in a place where he had long been left to reign supreme. Whether or not she would win, she would fight.
Because the Angel had her Idea. And her Idea was this: “Where the Enemy is, there must be Resistance. No matter how small or poor or funny, it must be there.”3 This was the Law of Everywhere. The Angel had learned it at her Tutor’s knee. The Law of Everywhere was everywhere the same. It taught that the best warriors against the Enemy always come from the most despised portion of any world.
So the Angel knew very well what she had to do, as she sank beneath the top layer of the yellow haze. Tilting parallel to the earth, and opening her wings to their full breadth, she shot through the smoke, the screaming, and the sirens coming up from the surface, and flew to where she knew the tip of the Resistance there would hide. She knew it would be in the ugliest, the meanest, the shabbiest, and the most cast-off of places. And it was to this place she flew now.
Chapter I
SNOTTY
Hamercy Street ran downhill from the highest point in Widdleshift, which was in the neighborhood of Makewater, which was in the district of Hackendosh, which was part of the county of Queerspittle. All of these were in the far northwest of what had once been the nation of Albion, but which was now known, in the great city of Megalopolis, as East New York.4
On Hamercy Street there lived a boy named Snotty. It was an ugly name, and he was an ugly boy. He had very big ears and a very big nose, and very little everything else. He was dusty colored and his eyes were red. His teeth were crooked and his elbows and knees stuck out of everything he wore, no matter how new or old—although his clothes were mostly old and didn’t fit him anyway.5
Inside of him was ugly, too. Inside of him was moldy and dusty and like it was filled with broken furniture and garbage. So he hardly ever looked inside. You wouldn’t have either, if you were Snotty.
Outside of him was not much better. Hamercy Street was mean and ugly and cold and wretched, and Snotty lived at the top of it, in a very ugly house, with his mother—who was no oil painting herself. He didn’t see much of her. She spent a lot of her time downstairs, on the pea green settee in front of the broken electric fire, watching TV with a can of lager in her hand. This—along with getting up once in awhile, yawning, and scratching her backside—pretty much constituted her career. She and Snotty had started out well enough when he was born and had shared a few laughs, and of course she felt more warmly toward him as he grew older and was able to pay rent. She liked the added income—on time and everything. Even though he was only twelve years old, Snotty was very punctual about business matters.
“I’ve got the best kid on all of Hamercy Street,” his mother bragged, sitting for a change on the tilting stoop of her house, of course still clutching her can of lager. “The best AND the smartest. Pays me rent and everything. Not like your useless bunch.”
The other mothers grunted at this. One of them, her dearest pal, gave Snotty’s mother a vicious look before taking herself inside and slamming the door after. The door was broken, and fell off its top hinge, which spoiled the effect. This made Snotty’s mother laugh so hard that the beer came out of her nose.6
“What’s with her?” she said as she wiped the beer off her face with the back of her hand.
“Don’t know,” shrugged one of the other mothers. “She’s been on a rag ever since that kid of hers got shot by the cops.”
“What, still? ” Snotty’s mother said cheerfully. “That was—must’ve been at least a month ago. AND he was a stupid kid. God.”
“She liked him though,” someone else said in a reflective way.
“Well, I mean, get over it,” Snotty’s mother said.
“Yeah.”
They sat there in the gathering gloom, and after awhile there didn’t seem to be much to say. So Snotty’s mother took herself off, too, braying up the stairs as she went back to her pea green settee: “Snotty? You up there or what?”
There was no answer. It didn’t matter. Snotty’s mother didn’t care. She went to the pea green settee, and, flopping herself on it, began to pick at a scab on her heel. She chortled as she remembered her neighbor’s face. “Got her good,” she thought. It was enough to keep Snotty’s mother happy for weeks, upsetting her friend that way. She yawned, satisfied with herself and her world, and with the half empty can of lager in her hand, curled up on the settee and snored. After a moment, the can tipped over and fell. As Snotty’s mother grunted, a line of stale beer snaked out over the worn carpet, following the warp of the floor to the bottom of the stair, which itself snaked up, listing and leaning, with a rattly old railing you wouldn’t want to lean on, all the way to a shifty little landing made out of cracked pieces of wood.
It was on this landing that Snotty stood, his tiny hand on the splintery wood of the railing. He listened hard until he heard his mother snore. And then he turned and went inside the attic door. His footstep was light—so light that it barely left a print, even in the fine dirt of the back alley off Hamercy Street—and he didn’t make a sound.
“This is the last time I’ll stand here,” Snotty thought to himself, looking around the attic—his room—with a dispassionate eye. “The very last time.”
Snotty had determined to leave his ugly little house