“I am afraid,” Ael said finally. “Afraid of it all having been for nothing, if I die. Or, even worse, afraid of being turned from my path afterward, if we succeed. If the old government of the Empire does indeed fall, if it is replaced by a Senate and Praetorate committed to the kind of changes I have been dreaming of, then I fear to be paid off, given a medal for my great contributions to my people’s culture, and sent away for a ‘well-deserved rest.’ Or perhaps not that, so much, as being too tired to come back from the rest afterward. Finding myself saying, ‘Not today. I have no stomach for the fight today. Tomorrow.’”
“And tomorrow never comes,” Jim said.
“True. And then, slowly, everything goes back to the way it was, after the fervor dies down,” Ael said. “And it all turns out to have been for nothing. The last stands and the first ones, the betrayals and the heroism, the great battles and the small. Despite them, everything ebbs back to what it was before. Oh, a few things are improved, some of the tyranny scraped away-but elsewhere it accretes again, and everything is as it was before. That is what I fear.”
“The inertia of history,” Jim said.
She glanced at him. “Is that what your people call it?”
“I don’t know,” Jim said. “But I know what you mean. The fear of not mattering, of having made no difference.”
-- “The Empty Chair”, Diane Duane
