In 1889, Garekyn had come awake to a planetary culture viciously marred by deep ignorance and judgment of people based on race. But strong pejorative attitudes towards people of color had never penetrated to Garekyn's soul, because the long-ago ancient world into which he'd been born was so very different.
In those days, when Garekyn had been made and sent to Earth, most everybody on the planet was the color that he was. Most everyone had Garekyn's black hair and dark eyes. And newly awakened in 1889, in Siberia, by a loving Russian anthropologist, Garekyn had been treated not as an inferior black man but as a miracle for which science could not account--a being sleeping unconscious in the ice, desiccated and seemingly without feeling, who through simple warmth and hydration had been restored to vitality.
Prince Alexi Brovotkin, the man who rescued and educated Garekyn, was an amateur anthropologist and collector of fossils, son of a Russian father and an English mother--a committed scholar who eventually wrote a lengthy paper on the discovery of Garekyn, only to have it rejected by every periodical to which he submitted it. Not a single scientist in Russia or Europe ever accepted Brovotkin's invitation to meet the twelve-thousand-year-old man he had delivered from the frozen wastes of Siberia. Of course, twelve thousand years was just an estimate of how long Gareky
n might have been frozen. No one could actually know.
No matter. Prince Alexi Brovotkin loved Garekyn from the moment that Garekyn had opened his eyes and looked at him. Brovotkin had taken Garekyn from Siberia back to his palace in Saint Petersburg, and within less than a week, the shocked and dazzled Garekyn had been baptized into the modern world by an experience that surpassed anything he had ever imagined.
It was January 15 in the year 1890 and Prince Brovotkin had taken Garekyn to the premiere of The Sleeping Beauty ballet by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky at the lavish gilded Mariinsky Theatre.
Garekyn had never conceived of such music or a spectacle as ornate and lovely as he beheld on the stage that night. Never mind the splendors of Saint Petersburg, or the libraries and luxuries of Brovotkin's vast home. Never mind the glittering decor of the Mariinsky Theatre. It was the music and the dancing that enchanted Garekyn--the coordinated power of orchestral instruments to make an intoxicating stream of music to which highly disciplined humans performed rhythmic movements of near-impossible artifice and grace.
It took years for Garekyn to explain what he had felt when he watched The Sleeping Beauty ballet and why this immense affirmation of innate goodness was so important to him. But the pleasure he experienced that night had convinced him that he bore no horrible, irrevocable guilt from some former and half-remembered omission or commission.
"We made the right choice," he said haltingly and repeatedly to Prince Brovotkin that night and for many nights after. "My brothers and my sister and I. We were right. This world, this gracious world, exonerates us!"
Ever after, Garekyn was convinced that if his original companions were alive and well and living in that century, he would find them in palaces devoted to the performance of opera or ballet, for they would find this new music and these new performances as enchanting as he did. They too would see it as emblematic of the splendor of humanity, of an innate goodness that surfaced in innumerable and unforeseen ways.
Someone a long time ago, a very long time ago, had used those words, "the splendor of humanity." That was in a different language, a language Garekyn could hear in his head but not write, yet Garekyn had translated the sentiment easily into the Russian or English he'd been learning from Prince Brovotkin. Garekyn's mind had been equipped for the quick understanding of language and the quick analysis of patterns and systems. He loved learning. And Prince Brovotkin loved him for it. But Garekyn's earliest memories were broken and fragmentary. They accosted him in unexpected and sometimes inexplicable flashes. His mind had been bruised and hurt in the catastrophe which had locked him in the ice. And who knew how the passage of time had affected Garekyn? He sought with all his might to recover every bit of vagrant memory that he could.
Three years after the premiere of The Sleeping Beauty ballet, when the great Tchaikovsky died, Garekyn wept bitterly. So did Prince Brovotkin. By that time, Garekyn had been thoroughly educated in the Prince's library and Prince Alexi had taken Garekyn to Paris twice and London once, to Rome and Florence and Palermo, and was planning to take him to America. Garekyn knew more about the late nineteenth century than he'd ever known or understood about his brief existence twelve thousand years earlier.
To Prince Brovotkin, Garekyn confided all that he knew of himself, of how he'd been sent with three other humanoid beings to Earth specifically to correct a grievous error. Bits and pieces came to Garekyn when he talked, when they traveled, when Garekyn read new books or saw new cities--when Garekyn encountered new wonders such as the Pyramids of Giza or the great Crystal Palace in London, or the great cathedral of Saint Mary of the Nativity in Milan.
People of the Purpose is what they had called themselves, Garekyn and his kindred, but not because they meant to fulfill what the Parents had sent them to do, but because they had conceived of another purpose far more important.
Splendor of humanity. A being who had spoken those words...but there Garekyn's faculties betrayed him. He could hear the voice, and see the eyes, pale eyes, not brownish black like his but remarkably pale greenish-blue eyes, so rare in that time on Earth, and golden-red hair--such lustrous golden-red hair.
Fleeting images, and broken questions obsessed Garekyn. He saw jungles in his dreams, jungles through which they'd walked together, he and his companions, struggling against insects and reptiles and the curious savages who had invited them into their villages and offered them abundant food and drink. He saw a vast glittering city beneath an immense transparent dome. Everything depends on your getting into the city itself. Nothing can be achieved unless you do. He recalled the faces and forms of the others, beloved Derek, the boyish one, and Welf, gentle, patient, and ever-smiling Welf, and the brilliant and commanding Kapetria, who never raised her voice in anger or enthusiasm.
The Parents had said to them all: You have been created for this one purpose and you will perish as you achieve your purpose, and without your perishing it cannot be done. Derek had cried when the Parents spoke those words. "But why do we have to die," Derek had asked. The Parents had been surprised by the question. Kapetria had taken Derek in her arms. "Is it necessary that this boy suffer so?"
Prince Brovotkin died in 1913 on the voyage to Brazil, leaving his entire estate to his adopted son, Garekyn. For a time, Garekyn had been lost. It was agony to see the Prince's body committed to the ocean deep, and he wept nightly for months afterwards, even as he traveled the length and breadth of the American continents. Even music did not comfort him. Garekyn had never experienced the death of a loved one, or grief. And he had to learn how to go on in spite of it. The search for his lost brothers and sister soon came to obsess him.
Even now as he walked up Fifth Avenue in the bracing cold air of mild winter, Garekyn wore an old military coat of fine black wool with brass buttons given to him by Prince Alexi. And in his vest, he carried the Prince's great pocket watch with the quotation from Shakespeare engraved inside the cover: LOVE ALL, TRUST A FEW, DO WRONG TO NONE.
Garekyn had never found any evidence anywhere of the others, his kin, as he called them. But he had never given up searching. If he was alive, they might still be alive. If he had been locked in the ice for thousands of years, so surely might they have been locked in the ice. And indeed, they might be locked in it still or only just released thanks to the strange phenomenon the world called "global warming."
And Garekyn's memories were increasing, bit by bit, and growing ever more detailed and disturbing.
The late twentieth century had given Garekyn new powerful instruments to fear, and also to help in his search for the others. Everywhere he traveled, he needed complex and carefully worded documents, and he lived in dread of an accident or illness that might put him in the hands of doctors who might discover in an emergency room that he was not human.
But the invention of the internet and the spread of social media had greatly emboldened Garekyn with regard to his search, providing opportunities for him that hadn't existed before. And it was through the internet that Garekyn had discovered the delightful and spirited Benji Mahmoud and the complex realm of Benji's blood drinkers, blood drinkers of all ages who called Benji's phone line for help from everywhere in the world, often enlisting the broadcast itself as a means of finding their lost ones.
What a striking idea, thought Garekyn. Might he not somehow through this broadcast find his lost ones? But how should he go about it, and how might he prevent an onslaught of responses from playful blood drinkers eager to pretend that they were Garekyn's companions and eager to play along with Garekyn's realm as humans sometimes did with the realm of Benji Mahmoud?
Benji Mahmoud thought he had a foolproof way of separating all others from his blood drinkers. He and his vampire kindred spoke in voices on the radio that only other vampires with their powerful preternatural hearing could hear. But Garekyn Brovotkin could also hear those voices effortlessly and detect a subtle difference in timbre in those voices from the voices of the humans who so badly wanted to play the imaginary game of the Children of the Night and the kingdom of the great Prince Lestat.
Almost immediately after his discovery of these enchanting broadcasts, Garekyn had heard mention of "Amel," and of the curious mythology of Amel, and Garekyn's mind had been disturbed as if by a whirling sandstorm. Amel. That very name, Amel.
This "Amel" according to the mythology of Benji Mahmoud was a spirit who had entered the world of human beings through the seduction of two powerful red-haired witches in ancient times, witches who had learned to communicate with the spirit and manipulate him. That these witches were red haired had also startled Garekyn. Garekyn had seen in a flash for the first time the being that he himself had known as Amel--with his pale white skin and red hair! And it had been this being who had said the words: the splendor of humanity.
Coincidences, probably. Coincidence and poetry. Fictive worlds. Likely Benji Mahmoud was an artist of fictive worlds of some sort, and made millions from his broadcast, though Garekyn could not turn up the slightest evidence of this or any money-making motivation. The program's websites offered nothing for sale. It did offer lots of exquisite pictures of beings who appeared to be human beings of unusually pale and radiant complexions, all of which might have been faked.
The more he listened, the more Garekyn had been intrigued that there had been disastrous consequences to this seduction of the spirit Amel, that he, in seeking to please the red-haired witches, had plunged into the physical body of an early Queen of the land of Kemet and created in so doing the very first "vampire." From this vampire came all other vampires, with Amel animating every single one in an unbroken chain to the present time.
Red hair. Amel. Ancient times. Immortals. It wasn't much to go on. But what about the distinct timbre of the voices? Was the spirit of Amel responsible for that as well? Amel gave great powers to his vampire children; they could spellbind "mortals," read minds, and develop over time the power to kinetically burn their opponents or break down doorways. They could even learn how to defy gravity and fly.