On se demande parfois si la vie a un sens, et puis on rencontre des êtres qui donnent un sens à la vie.

(Sometimes you ask yourself if life has any meaning and then you meet people who give live a meaning.)

- Gyula Halasz Brassaï

When I entered Mr Tuniak's office today, he appeared more thoughtful than usual. He greeted me, but he seemed older than last week. I have noticed (and noted) before that more time passed for him between our meetings than for me, but it had never been as obvious as today. Maybe the reason for that was that the topic of “age” seemed to trouble him a bit today.

“When you are young, you try to change the world”, he finally said. “When you get older and realise that the world won't be changed so easily, you start trying to at least leave your mark. For that reason I met with my mothers in Singapore, in a restaurant called Aurum. Eshe and Philip were also there.”

I remembered Eshe. I had met her several months ago in Iceland and like Philip, she belonged to the few immortals that lived in a little house on the island.

“Sorry, for interrupting you”, I said, “I know that it's not important, but I am curious: Was there anything special about the restaurant?”

“Yes”, Mr Tuniak answered, slightly amused. “Have you ever heard of molecular gastronomy? No? Well, the cooks there tried to create not only new dishes, but completely new tastes. Why did you ask?”

“I was just wondering if you had ever eaten or met someone in a... normal or average restaurant”, I replied.

Mr Tuniak laughed. “No, I don't think I ever did”, he admitted. “But because we have a time machine, any place and any time is pretty much close at hand for us, so why not make use of that?”

“Are you sure that this is a restaurant?”, Philip asked, after he had entered and looked around. “It looks more like an OP to me.”

“I think that's the idea”, Maria replied.

They went, followed by Eshe, Helen and Alexander to the table they had reserved in advance. But instead of chairs there were wheel chairs.

“Well, at least, they seem to know how old we all are”, Eshe commented, while sitting down. She put her hand on the arm of the chair. “How disappointing, it's not real gold. But it looks good.”

“If you like it, you should come back soon. One year from now, this place will have closed down”, Maria said. A waiter appeared and they all ordered different dishes.

“Do you think anyone will remember this place ten years from now?”, Alexander asked no one in particular. “Philip, did you ever wonder what your legacy might look like?”

Philip shook his head. “No.”

“Neither have I”, Eshe said. “If you don't die, you can't really leave anything behind.”

Looking at the table from the outside, it presented a strange picture. The people, who seemed to be the youngest, were actually the oldest, but at the same time they had probably a lot more of their lives left than the other three.

“Did I tell you about the time capsules Yuuto is hiding all over the planet?”, Alexander asked and everyone at the table nodded.

“It's a nice idea, but as with everything he does, he isn't really behind it”, Philip said. “The way he is doing it, he can only save a small percentage... the percentage of a percentage maybe of all possible knowledge.”

“I was thinking... what if one would implement this idea, but on a much broader scope”, Alexander said. Out of the corners of his eyes, he saw how his mothers focused their whole attention on him. Maybe they feared that he wanted to change the course of history again, but they didn't say anything and let him continue and make his case. “I have met a woman in the nineteenth centuy, who wants to preserve all the knowledge of her time. Her name is Cailinn Noneach. Have you heard of her?” His mothers, who were working with Gemini, knew the name of course.

“I think I have read one of her books”, Eshe said. “But it's been... quite a few years. She wrote travel books or something like that, didn't she?”

“She was the founder... well, the inspiration for the Gemini Foundation which aims to collect and store all knowledge of humanity, wherever it may come from”, Alexander explained. “But Gemini is of course limited in what it can do. They can't go into the past and therefore a lot of the things humans have done or discovered are not accessible to them.”

“And you want to travel into the past for Gemini and do what they can not?”, Helen asked and Alexander noticed that she was only barely able to surpress a smile. “To go and document everything you can find there?”

“Yes”, Alexander said. “No one has to know where the data is coming from. I can do it in secret. And Gemini is – unfortunately – not that well known world wide, that it would cause any kind of... What are you two laughing about?”

“You are trying to convince us of something, we have already planned on doing for a while”, Maria said. “Why do you think we decided to join Gemini?”

“We already have several ideas and... well, not quite plans, but the first stages of plans about what we should do and how we should do it”, Helen added. “But there is one thing one of us has to do first.”

“My mothers and I thought that before we could do anything like that, there was one person we had to convince that this was the right thing to do”, Mr Tuniak said. “Juliette Belloq. She knew more about time and time travel than anyone else and she was the only one who could say with certainty... well, with near certainty if what we were doing was doing any harm to the course of history or not.”

“You just wanted to collect knowledge”, I said. “How can that be bad?”

“And when I was young, I just wanted to help humanity along to reach better technology quicker than it did, what can be bad about that?”, Mr Tuniak returned. “Unfortunately, good intentions are no protection against bad results.” He was silent for a moment, in case I wanted to say something else, but when I didn't, he continued. “I left Juliette a message in Gibraltar, telling her that I wanted to meet her in Aachen in 1374.”

“Why didn't you wait for her in Gibraltar?”

“What's with the video camera?”, Juliette asked. “Do you want to be conspicuous?”

“No one is going to see us out here”, Alexander assured her. He had put the camera on a tripod on a hill and was filming the happenings of a village, not far away. “And no one is coming up here, because down there everyone is dancing. Do you want to see it?”

Juliette stood behind the camera and looked at the little screen at its back. Thanks to the zoom function she could see the dancing people in the village as if she was standing right next to them. “Is it some kind of festival?”, she wanted to know.

“No, everyone just spontaneously started to dance”, Alexander answered. “No one knows why. Not even in the future There are of course theories, there always are... stress, something in the water, maybe it is some kind of festival... but no one knows for sure.”

“I'm guessing there is a reason why you wanted to see me here”, Juliette said. “And I don't think you want me to film you while you join them...”

“No, I'm just here to film it”, Alexander said.

“Why?”

“Why not? As I just said, no one knows why people started to dance. No one knows why they stopped again, why it never happened again after a certain date. Completely disappeared. Maybe it will come back. Maybe it won't. The point is we don't know. But if it should ever return, in the future, we will have more information, we will have these videos... And partly, it's just simple, old fashioned curiosity on my part. When you get to be as old as I am...” He stopped without finishing the sentence and looked questioningly at Juliette. “Which one of us is actually older?”

“If in doubt, I am”, Juliette said. “Why did you want to talk to me?”

Alexander told her about the idea his mothers and he had. He told her of the great amounts of knowledge that they hoped to preserve for the future. He told her about their first – but by no means finished and final – plans they had to store the collected information in a safe place. “And I tell you all of this, because we want to make sure that what we are doing has no negative influence... has no influence of any kind on the course of history. We don't live in the best of all worlds, maybe not even in the best possible world, but we have seen... the end and we know that we live in a world and in a history that works. And we want to make sure that it stays that way.”

“So, if I tell you that what you are planning to do is too dangerous...”

“...we won't do it”, Alexander promised her.

“Have you ever been to the far future?”, Juliette wanted to know, but Alexander shook his head. “Well, it isn't that important anyway... You want my blessing for your project? You have it. But there are certain conditions.” She listed several things she thought they should pay particular attention to and every time Alexander agreed with her without reservation.

“There was one last person I wanted to talk to before I started on our project”, Alexander said.

“Cailinn?”, I guessed.

“Exactly”, he confirmed. “Between the publication of her first and second book, several years had passed. A lot more time than between any of her other books. There had been a time when she hadn't been sure if she should continue writing and I wanted to know why.”

Cailinn was on a train, sitting alone in her cabin and although she was looking out the window, she didn't really pay a lot of attention to her surroundings. She was lost in her thoughts. She only noticed that someone had joined and taken the seat opposite her, when the person coughed slightly.

“Alexander, what are you doing her?”, she asked in surprise, as she recognised her fellow passenger.

“I just wanted to see how you are”, he said. “Are you going to London?”

“Yes, I'm meeting Hugo there”, Cailinn answered. “Why are you here?” Her eyes suddenly seemed to glow from an inner light. “Is something unsual and unexpected going to happen during the journey?”

“Not to my knowledge”, Alexander said and the fire within Cailinn, the fire that had been responsible for the glow in her eyes, was extinguished. “I am only here to ask you one question: Why haven't you written another book yet? When last we met, you were so full of ideas...”

“It is difficult to write books that nobody wants to read”, Cailinn said. “I did not expect a huge success or anything, but the numbers were... quite disappointing and depressing even for me.”

“You are disappointed that nobody is reading your books?”, Alexander said. He thought about that for a moment. Then he looked out of the window. He saw that the train was still standing in the station and waited for the last passengers. He stood up and took Cailinn's hand. “Come with me! I want to show you what your books... what your book is going to be responsible for one day.”

Mr Tuniak fell silent. I looked up from my notes and over to him. “You are only going to tell me what you showed to Cailinn when I return next week, won't you?”, I said.

“I will show it to you then”, he promised.

“Have you ever been compared to Sheherazade?”

NEXT WEEK

Nur wer die Vergangenheit kennt, hat eine Zukunft.