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 Garekyn 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.