The broadcasts of the blood drinker had been going on for years. They lasted from one to two hours nightly; and thereafter the internet stream was made up of recordings of older broadcasts, and Garekyn had sifted carefully through all that material for the last six months until he had exhausted all broadcasts currently available in media of any form. He had learned all he could in this way about Benji Mahmoud and the beings who made up Benji’s universe: blood drinkers all throughout the world, thought to be fictional by the New York journalists who wrote now and then on the “phenomenon” of Benji’s “program,” though human ears could not know the full extent of it.

Ah yes, Garekyn thought as he walked faster now, it might all be a waste of time. But he loved New York at twilight, with the traffic thickening, and lights coming on brilliantly all around him in towers and townhouses, and people taking to the streets as they left their places of employment to join in the vigorous nightlife that would go on unabated until the small hours of the following morning.

And so if I do not find literal immortals on this night, Garekyn thought, what have I lost?

Garekyn was a tall male, just over six feet in height, of a powerful and lean build with long black curling hair to his shoulders. There was a heavy gold streak in his hair, on the right side of the center part, and he had fierce engaging brownish-black eyes. His nose was long and narrow, and he had very dark brown skin. He was walking fast, wanting to reach his destination before darkness. The exalted tribe of Benji Mahmoud came alive only at darkness, according to their “mythology,” and he was out to discover if the mythology had a bit of truth.

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.