It seemed like only yesterday when Id died, but, of course, it was almost certainly centuries ago. I wish the computer would just tell me, dammitall, but it was doubtless waiting until its sensors said I was sufficiently stable and alert. The irony was that my pulse was surely racing out of concern, forestalling it speaking to me. If this was an emergency, it should inform me, and if it wasnt, it should let me relax.

Finally, the machine did speak in its crisp, feminine voice. “Hello, Toby. Welcome back to the world of the living.”

“Where—” Id thought Id spoken the word, but no sound had come out. I tried again. “Where are we?”

“Exactly where we should be: decelerating toward Soror.”

I felt myself calming down. “How is Ling?”

“Shes reviving, as well.”

“The others?”

“All forty-eight cryogenics chambers are functioning properly,” said the computer. “Everybody is apparently fine.”

That was good to hear, but it wasnt surprising. We had four extra cryochambers; if one of the occupied ones had failed, Ling and I would have been awoken earlier to transfer the person within it into a spare.

“Whats the date?”

“16 June 3296.”

Id expected an answer like that, but it still took me back a bit. Twelve hundred years had elapsed since the blood had been siphoned out of my body and oxygenated antifreeze had been pumped in to replace it. Wed spent the first of those years accelerating, and presumably the last one decelerating, and the rest—

—the rest was spent coasting at our maximum velocity, 3,000 km/s, one percent of the speed of light.

My father had been from Glasgow; my mother, from Los Angeles. They had both enjoyed the quip that the difference between an American and a European was that to an American, a hundred years was a long time, and to a European, a hundred miles is a big journey.