Which would you choose, reader, of the five gates of Esperanza City? Which you, Master Hobbes? I have not had the liberty to choose my gate at Esperanza since the earliest bloom of childhood, when, like all kids, I chose the Sport Gate, with its perfected slope, half snow, half ice, whose custodians invite arrivals to complete the journey into the city by sled, skate, sleigh, ski, every apparatus our playful race has conceived to turn freeze into fun. But you, who have the maturation of philosophy, may choose otherwise. The Nature Gate, perhaps? Whose long, camouflaged tunnel lets all spy at leisure on the reserve where horde on horde of ambling, hardy penguins glut themselves on the bounty Oceanus brings even to the lifeless ice? Or the wonder-garden of the subsurface Water Gate? Where the generators trail and throb like giant jellyfish, turning the sea’s vast motions into energy, while the plankton nurtured on their tendrils feed the fish shoals, meat vats, and glittering krill on which the native penguins, immigrant humans, and itinerant great whales feast as equals.

Reader: “I do not need to choose only one, Mycroft; all thy world and gates stand equally open to me, who commands history’s pages.”

Hobbes: “As for myself, I know nothing of these gates. But since you do, friend Reader, please choose for me. You are sovereign here, and know what I would choose as well as I do.”

Reader: “True, Thomas, and it takes little deliberation to assign you the City Gate, built aloft for cars that docked high on the central spire, beneath whose transparent parapet the whole metropolis, with its streets and lives and treasures, stretched naked before the analyst’s eye. As for this time-stranger Achilles Mojave, do I guess right, Mycroft, that thou broughtest him by the History Gate?”