“
Well, whatever did those old brutes think about evil, then?"
"It's hard to say exactly. they seemed to be obsessed with locating it somewhere. I mean, an evil spring in the mountains, an evil smoke, evil blood in the veins going from parent to child. They were sort of like the early explorers of Oz, except the maps they made were of invisible stuff, pretty inconsistent one with the other."
"And where is evil located?" Galinda asked, flopping onto her bed and closing her eyes.
"Well, they didn't agree, did they? Or else what would they have to write sermons arguing about? Some said the original evil was the vacuum caused by the Fairy Queen Lurline leaving us alone here. When goodness removes itself, the space it occupies corrodes and becomes evil, and maybe splits apart and multiples. So every evil is a sign of the absence of deity."
"Well I wouldn't know an evil thing if it fell on me," said Galinda.
"The early unionists, who were a lot more Lurlinist than unionists are today, argued that some invisible pocket of corruption was floating around the neighborhood, a direct descendent of the pain the world felt with Lurline left. Like a patch of cold air on a warm still night. A perfectly agreeable soul might march through it and become infected, and then go and kill a neighbor. But then was it your fault if you walked through a patch of badness? If you couldn't see it? There wasn't ever any council of unionists that decided it one way or the other, and nowadays so many people don't even believe in Lurline."
"But they believe in evil still," said Galinda with a yawn. "Isn't that funny, that deity is passe but the attributes and implications of deity linger -"
"You are thinking!" Elphaba cried. Galinda raised herself to her elbows at the enthusiasm in her roomie's voice.
"I am about to sleep, because this is profoundly boring to me," Galinda said, but Elphaba was grinning from ear to ear.
”
”
Gregory Maguire (Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (The Wicked Years, #1))