we’ve discovered lies close to our own—Romulus and Remus founded Rome, as King Arthur lies at the bottom of the story of their England, so Snotty is at the bottom of our story. What happens to him is what happened to us.
This is the place to say I suspect more. What I suspect, but cannot yet prove, would rock our foundation. And can I, despite my duties as a scholar, take that responsibility? It is difficult, if not impossible to know. What I will say here is: Snotty is Arcadia. Until we know him, we do not know ourselves. Until we know ourselves, we can never free ourselves from the cycle of vengeance and terror that ravages our once beautiful land.
My heart is heavy with sadness for Arcadia as I read the final proofs of SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY, the book that is, in truth, the first book in the history of Arcadia. The footnotes are meant to be of use to my academic colleagues in further research, but may be ignored by the merely curious reader who wants to see what happens next in the story.
I urge the reader: don’t give up on Snotty. His adventures prove that if even one person knows who he or she really is, whole worlds can change. Ours did.
And I urge my colleagues: continue the research. It may be, even, that the study of SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY and of other folk and fairy tales might lead to the answer to the one great remaining question of Arcadian science—why it is that our history begins only eighty-one years ago, and why even those who lived in the time before that have no clear idea of the sequence of events before that time. This has always been the puzzle, of the type that ambitious graduate students dream of solving, and that is ignored, perhaps in frustration, by older and wiser scientists. Who knows but that an answer to this strange conundrum may be found, as so many other truths have been found, in fairy tales and legends such as these. Who knows what answers to other, even more intractable, problems might not be discovered through finding the true solution. I urge my colleagues, all my students, don’t cease looking for the truth! I will do what I can, but my time is running out. Already, tonight, in my tower at Wrykyn, overlooking the Lily Pond, I can hear the explosions coming near—too near. And I am very tired.
My thanks, as always, to the Senior Common Room of St Vitus’s College, Otterbridge University, and especially to Dr. Alan Fallaize, Professor Malcolm Sivia, and Professor Joyanna Bender Boyce-Flood. And to my beloved great-granddaughter Shiva Todhunter: may the landscapes you paint be peaceful in the future, and may you teach my great-great-granddaughter Devindra the ways of Sophia the Wise.
Professor Devindra Vale The Tower By The Pond St. Vitus’s College Otterbridge University Wrykyn Arcadia
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
