From Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses:
�Where are we heading, exactly?� Lee said.
�East, and a little farther downtown,� the Elf-king said. �There�s another potential �rogue� worldgate nearby; we can use it to get out of here, and slow down the pursuit a little more.�
He waited until they came to the next corner, gazed up at the sign. �This is it,� Laurin said. �East from here.�
They crossed Sixth Avenue. �It�s weird,� Lee said absently, while her mind was turning over the awful things the Elf-king had told them. �Except for the vehicles, the place looks normal.� She glanced down Sixth Avenue. �But where�s the World Trade Center gone?�
Gelert glanced down the way she was looking, shrugged his ears, winced. �Other side of the island, maybe? This is an alternate universe…”
They went on down Sixth Street, past the brownstones, mostly ignored by passersby who saw nothing but a man, a woman and a very big white dog, possibly some kind of wolfhound. Lee, for her own part, was finding it increasingly difficult just to be in this space; it itched, burning on her skin, and she wondered how the people here bore it. This was not a world that was kind to life. Her lungs were burning, too, not just with smog. The air here was full of something unfriendlier still, the presence of a universe that didn�t care anymore, if it ever had. How do you make a universe stop paying attention to what happens in it? How badly do you have to hurt it that it turns its back on what�s living in it, just lies there, passive, unwilling to get involved? For she couldn�t shake the feeling that this place hadn�t always been this way; its ethical constant hadn�t always been this low, couldn�t have been. Something had to have happened.
Or you hope it did, the colder side of her mind answered her back. What if it was always this way? What if this is a perfectly normal way for some universes to be? And what if, when our sheaf rotates again someday, more universes are created like this�or worse?
That was a thought too awful to entertain. It has to be possible to heal such places, Lee thought, or to keep them from happening. If there was any way, any way in the worlds…
(and in Wizard’s Holiday:)
Nita went quietly down the stairs. The living room was empty, but from the dining room she heard a voice, Tom�s voice. Nita froze only a few steps from the stairs.
�It�s something we just have to deal with,� Tom was saying. �Sometimes you hit � When we speak of them in English, we call them �cardinal events,� which is a vague equivalent to a word in the Speech that�s derived from the Speech�s root word for �hinge.� There are moments in the lives of people, of nations, of cultures, of worlds, on which everything to come afterward hangs, or turns � like the hinge of a door. If intervention comes at one moment, the door swings one way. If it comes a moment early, a moment late, the hinge swings another. And sometimes no intervention, regardless of its size, is enough to change the way the door swings. There are some changes that simply have so much impetus behind them, driven by the force of earlier events � the way in which other �hinges� have swung � that there�s no stopping them, no matter what you do. As a result, a life changes, or ends… or a thousand lives do, or three thousand… and whole avalanches of change come tumbling down through the opening left by the way that door swung. All a wizard can do, in the face of one of these avalanches of chance and change, is pick a spot to intervene in the consequences and try to clean up afterward.� And Tom sighed. �No matter what we do,� he said, �entropy is still running.�
There was a long silence. �I�m so sorry,� Nita heard her dad say.
�Not half as sorry as we were,� Tom said, �that we couldn�t stop it.� Another painful breath. �But day by day, in the aftermath, we do what we can, and try to be ready for the next �hinge�…try to recognize it when it comes. It�s all we can do. And we have to keep reminding ourselves, because we know it�s true, that what comes of what we do will eventually make a difference; and the Powers That Be will find a way through even our species� worst cruelties to something better, if we just don�t give up.�
