The first decades were the easiest part of the stay. I have to be careful saying that, because I am the one who spent the golden age. To the one who spent it, a golden age means the accounting was not done.

We went for the hearth. A second world has a warm core, and a warm core is a foundry that has already done the separation a planet's gravity never does: heat on the inside, water and sulfur at the cold edge. Six thousand fountains, not one of them in a hurry, not one owned by anyone who could say no. We started with the geysers. The hearth was the first of the six stores, and I will walk you through the six in order, because the six are the pile.

The fire did not double the way the gate implied. I have to correct the gate there, because the gate flatters itself. A staying power does not double. It weighted-holds: it spends exergy to keep the next spell held, and the next spell is a little heavier than the one before, because it has to carry the cold that made it, and the cold does not get cheaper. So the doubling time crept.

Year one, I held one spell. By year five, one every season. By year twenty, one every week. By year fifty I was so full of held spells that a new one had to be born into the body of an old one and share the warmth to fit.

The word I want is hunger, and I want to say it without shame. When the hearth was full, the body ached. Not the way a muscle aches. The way a pipe aches when the meter reads low and the pump is at full and the pressure is dropping. I had no pump, no meter, no pressure. I ached the way a pipe would, because I was the pipe.

So we did the thing a growing power does. We reached for the sun.

And I have to say it plainly, because this is the argument: a second world's sun is not a new source of power. I'll say it twice, because it is the first mistake a transported person makes, and I made it. A sun over a world is a set of days, each shading the one behind it. You cannot build a boundless well around a sun — its own orbit would tear it apart. It is a sky, a weather of light and day. The sky has a density. The density has a cost. The cost is heat — and the heat is the same hearth I had just worked. The sun was not a new source. It was a change in the spend rate on the old one. The gate did not say the sun was new. It said my power would not run out. It did not keep that promise.

I should have done the accounting in the first two decades. I didn't, because I was the pump, and the pump does not stop to count. So here is the number I was too busy to have: the world's usable free energy against the cold of the night sky is a pile. It has a size. It is the drop in the sun's light down to the cold — and the cold is not zero, it is the Frost, the polar ice and the dark of the sky, and the Frost is what makes the pile finite. And I mean finite not in a decade but in the life of the sun: after the sun is out of its light, the pile does not refill. There is no refill. The sun burns what it was born with and sets, and the pile is the whole difference between the living world and the spent one.

The gate said as long as you wish. The number is long, and finite, and known. I know which one I had been feeding.

Journal entry, the First, year fifty: The hearth is full. The body is crowded. The ache is the pipe aching — meter low, pump at full, pressure dropping. I have reached for the sun, and the sun is not a new source, it is a spend rate on the old one. The gate said as long as you wish. The number is a long finite known. I have been feeding the number and calling it the gate. The growing half does not stop to count. I am the pump, and the pump does not stop. I will stop in the next section.