All Alone In The Night

All Alone in The Night

One hundred and eight years. That's how long the crossing took. They spent most of the time in chilled hibernation, aging at only one thirtieth normal. But that didn't mean they aged just a little more than three years in the crossing. No, that slumbering interval they hardly noticed. It was the time in between that gnawed at their mind.

The sleep was no good for more than four months subjective -- not if you wanted any muscle or bone mass to survive. So every ten years of real time, they awoke, spent six months recovering and doing maintenance aboard the ship. Then they slept again, repeating the cycle nine or ten times until they came to Tau Ceti. Nearly a decade of aging on the body was almost nothing compared to the five or six years spent in the darkened void, staring at stars so far away to make them feel like insignificant specs on the face of the universe.

It was a wonder more of them didn't go mad.

-- Richard Hakluyt, The Sublight Age, Markham Press, 2752