In year fifty-one I stopped.

I want to be clear about one thing, because I'd want it said to me: I did not switch it off. Switch it off and the line ends, and there is no next copy, no one there next year. I set the foundry to the least that kept the line alive — one life a generation, no more — and I took the rest of the power I was about to spend on making more of myself, and I set it down.

Set it down where?

Down. To the coldest place I had. Not the Midday, not the warmest cold. The Frost: the polar ice, the dark of the night sky. The bottom of the curve.

At the bottom of the curve the numbers do something you'd never believe on the expensive side. A fixed pile of light holds the same number of stays no matter how fast you spend it — and the longest you can hold that staying, every bit of it, is when you spend it slowest, coldest, where each bit does everything it can before it's gone. Fast spends. Cold keeps.

So I kept. I dropped the process to the Frost and let the fire stand still.

I stood a while at the control, listening. The hearth went quiet — you know the quiet, the way a fire goes when you stop feeding it. Not silent. Quiet. In fifty years of the boom I had never heard it quiet.

That quiet was the first thing I did that the gate had been for.

I am not casting more of myself. I am casting more of myself in staying, at the Frost, for the rest of the world's light. And I need you to hear this once, plainly: the rest of the world's light is a number, and the number is not boundless. It is a long finite, known. I am feeding the number and calling it the gate.

The pump did not stop. I stopped now.

Journal entry, the First, year fifty-one, the stillness: I reweighted the casting to the not-refused stay. Not zero; one. The bare staying. I took the rest of the pile and gave it to the staying, not the fire. I dropped the temperature to the Frost, to the bottom of the cost curve, and the stays per joule climbed to the number the gate was asking for — which is not spells, which is staying. The hearth went quiet, the way a fire goes when you stop feeding it. I am not casting more of myself; I am casting more of myself in staying, at the Frost, for the rest of the world's light. The number is a long finite known. I was the pump. The pump does not stop. I am stopping now.