The Sigma Protocol (75 page)

“And so you ‘disappear’ them. Every year. Thousands and thousands of children.”

“Typically from war-torn regions where their life expectancy would be paltry, anyway. This way, at least, they do not die in vain.”

“No, they don’t die in vain. They die for vanity. They die so that you and your friends can live forever, isn’t that it?”
This is not a man you argue with
, Ben thought, but he was finding it increasingly difficult to contain his outrage.

Lenz scoffed, “Forever? Please, none of us will live forever. All we’re doing is arresting the aging process in some cases, reversing it in others. The enzyme enables us to repair much of the damage to the skin, the integument. Reverse the damage caused by heart disease. As yet, this therapy can only occasionally restore us to the prime of our youth. And even to give someone my age his forty-year-old body back is time-consuming…”

“These people,” Ben said, “they all come here to… to become younger.”

“Only a few of them. Most of them are public figures who can’t change their appearance drastically without attracting attention. So they come here, at my invitation, to
halt
their aging, maybe undo some of the damage that age has inflicted.”

“Public figures?” Ben shot back mockingly. “They’re all rich and powerful!” He was beginning to understand what Lenz was doing.

“No, Benjamin. They’re the great ones. The leaders of our society, our culture. The few who advance our civilization. The founders of Sigma came to understand this. They saw that civilization was fragile, and that there was only one way to ensure the continuity that it required. The future of the industrial state had to be protected, sheltered from the storms. Our societies would only advance if we could push back the horizon of human mortality. Year by year, Sigma used whatever tools it had at its disposal, but now the original goals can be advanced by other, more effective means—good God, we’re talking about something far more effective than throwing billions of dollars at coups and political action groups. We’re talking about the formation of a stable, lasting elite.”

“So these are the leaders of our civilizations…”

“Precisely.”

“And you’re the man who leads the leaders.”

Lenz responded with a thin smile. “Please, Benjamin. I have no interest in boss-man theatrics. But in any organization, there must be a… coordinator.”

“And there can only be one.”

A pause. “Ultimately, yes.”

“And what of those who oppose your ‘enlightened’ regime? I suppose they’re purged from the body politic.”

“A body
must
purge toxins if it is to survive, Benjamin.” Lenz spoke with surprising gentleness.

“What you’re describing isn’t some utopia, Lenz. It’s a slaughterhouse.”

“Your reproach is as glib as it is vacuous,” Lenz returned. “Life is a matter of trade-offs, Benjamin. You live in a world where vastly greater sums are spent on medications for erectile dysfunction than are spent on tropical diseases that claim the lives of millions every year. And what of your own
personal
decisions? When you buy a bottle of Dom Perignon, you have spent a sum of money that could have vaccinated a village in Bangladesh, spared lives from the ravages of disease, yes? People will
die
, Benjamin, as a result of the decisions, the priorities, entailed by your purchase. I’m quite serious: Can you deny that the ninety dollars a bottle of Dom Perignon costs could have easily saved half a dozen lives, perhaps more? Think about it. The bottle will yield seven or eight glasses of wine. Each glass, we can say, represents a life lost.” His eyes were bright, a scientist having solved an equation and moved on to another one. “That is why I say that such trade-offs are inevitable. And once you understand that, you start to ask higher order questions: qualitative questions, not quantitative ones. Here we have the opportunity to vastly extend the useful life span of a great humanitarian or thinker—someone whose contribution to the common-weal is inarguable. Compared to this good, what is the life of a Serbian goatherd? Of an illiterate child who would have otherwise been destined to a life of poverty and petty criminality. Of a Gypsy girl who would otherwise spend her days picking the pockets of tourists visiting Florence, her nights picking lice out of her hair. You have been taught that lives are sacrosanct, and yet every day you make decisions signifying an awareness that
some lives are more valuable than others. I
mourn
for those who have given their lives for the greater good. I truly do. I genuinely wish that the sacrifice they made was unnecessary. But I also know that every great achievement in the history of our species has come at the cost of human lives. ‘There is no document of civilization that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism’: a great thinker said that, a thinker who died too young.”

Ben stood blinking, speechless.

“Come,” Lenz said, “there’s someone who wants to say hello to you. An old friend of yours.”

Ben gaped. “Professor Godwin?”

“Ben.”

It was his old college mentor, long since retired. But his posture seemed straighter, his once wrinkled skin was now smooth and pink. He looked younger by several
decades
than his eighty-two years. John Barnes Godwin, emeritus historian of Europe in the twentieth century, was vigorous. His handshake was firm.

“Good Lord,” Ben said. If he hadn’t known Godwin, he’d have put his age in the early fifties.

Godwin was one of the elect. Of course: he was a behind-the-scenes kingmaker, he was powerful and extremely well connected.

Godwin stood before him as mind-boggling proof of Lenz’s achievement. They stood in a small antechamber off the great hall, which was comfortably furnished with couches and easy chairs, throw pillows and reading lamps, and racks of newspapers and magazines in a variety of languages.

Godwin seemed pleased at Ben’s astonishment. Jürgen Lenz beamed.

“You must not know what to make of all this,” Godwin said.

It took Ben a few seconds before he could think of a response. “That’s one way of putting it.”

“It’s extraordinary, what Dr. Lenz has achieved. We’re all deeply grateful to him. But I think we’re also aware of the significance, the
gravity
, of his gift. In essence, we’ve been given our lives back. Not our youth so much as—as another chance. A reprieve from death.” He frowned thoughtfully. “Is it against nature? Maybe. The way curing cancer is against nature. Emerson, remember, told us that old age is ‘the only disease.’”

His eyes gleamed. Ben listened in stunned silence.

In college, Ben had always addressed him as Professor Godwin, but now he chose not to address him by name at all. He said simply, “Why?”

“Why? On a personal level? Do you have to ask? I’ve been given another lifetime. Perhaps even another
two
lifetimes.”

“Will you gentlemen excuse me?” Lenz interrupted. “The first helicopter is about to leave, and I must say good-bye.” He bustled, almost sprinted, out of the room.

“Ben, when you get to be my age, you don’t buy green bananas,” Godwin resumed. “You don’t take on book projects you don’t think you’ll live to complete. But think of how much I can
do
now. Until Dr. Lenz called, I’d felt as if I’d struggled and worked and learned for decades to get where I am, to learn what I know, to gain the
understanding
I have—yet at any moment everything might be snatched away: ‘If youth but knew, if old age but could,’ right?”

“Even if all this is true—”

“You have
eyes
. You can see what’s in front of you. Look at me, for God’s sake! I used not to be able to climb the stairs at Firestone Library, and now I can
run
.” Godwin, Ben realized, was not just a successful experiment, he was
one of them
—a conspirator with Lenz. Didn’t he know about the cruelty, the murders?

“But have you
seen
what’s going on here—the child refugees on the lawn? Thousands of abducted children?
That
doesn’t bother you?”

Godwin looked visibly uncomfortable. “I’ll admit there are aspects of all this that I prefer not to know about, and I’ve always made that clear.”

“We’re talking about the ongoing murder of thousands of children!” Ben said. “The treatment
requires
it. Lenz calls it ‘harvesting,’ a pretty word for systematic slaughter.”

“It’s?…” Godwin faltered. “Well, it’s morally complex. ‘
Honesta turpitudo est pro causa bona
.’”

“‘For a good cause, wrongdoing is virtuous,’” Ben translated. “Publilius Syrus. You taught me that.”

Godwin, too. He’d gone over; he’d joined Lenz. “What’s important is that the cause has genuine merit.” He ambled over to a leather sofa. Ben sat facing him on the adjacent sofa.

“And were you involved in Sigma’s cause in the old days as well?”

“Yes, for decades. And I feel so privileged to be around for this whole new phase. Under Lenz’s leadership, things are going to be very different.”

“I gather not all your colleagues agreed.”

“Oh yes. The
angeli rebelli
, Lenz calls them. Rebel angels. There
were
a handful of people who wanted to put up a fight. Out of vanity or shortsightedness. Either they never trusted Lenz, or they felt demoted by the fact that new leadership had emerged. I guess a few of them had qualms about the… sacrifices that had to be made. Any time there’s a shift in power, you’ve got to expect some forms of resistance. But a few years ago, when Lenz allowed that his project would soon be ready for actual trials, he made it clear the collective would have to recognize his leadership. He didn’t do it
out of any sense of self-interest, either. It’s just that some difficult decisions would have to be made about who was going to be—well, admitted into the program. Inducted into the permanent elite. The risk of factionalism was too great. Lenz was the leader we needed. Most of us recognized that. A few didn’t.”

“Tell me, does your plan ultimately call for making this treatment available to everyone, to the masses? Or just what he calls ‘the great ones’?”

“Well, you raise a serious point. I was flattered that Jürgen selected me to be a kind of recruiter, as it were, for this august group of world… luminaries, I suppose. The
Wiedergeborenen
, as Dr. Lenz calls us—the Reborn. We’re reaching out far beyond the Sigma rump group. I brought Walter in, you know, and my old friend Miriam Bateman—Justice Miriam Bateman. I’ve been charged with helping choose those who seem deserving of it. From around the world—China, Russia, Europe, Africa—everywhere, without prejudice. Except for a prejudice in favor of greatness.”

“But Arnold Carr’s not much older than I am…”

“In fact, he’s really at the perfect age to begin these treatments. He can stay forty-two for the rest of his very, very long life, if he chooses. Or become the biological equivalent of thirty-two again.” The historian widened his eyes in wonderment. “There are forty of us by now.”

“I understand,” Ben interrupted, “but—”

“
Listen
to me, Ben! Good Lord, the other Supreme Court Justice we’ve chosen, a great jurist who’s also black, he’s a sharecropper’s son who’s lived through segregation and desegregation both. The wisdom he’s accumulated in his lifetime! Who could ever replace him? A painter whose work is already transforming the art world—how many more spectacular canvases might
be in him? Imagine, Ben, if history’s greatest composers and writers and artists—take Shakespeare, take Mozart, take—”

Ben leaned forward. “This is insanity!” he thundered. “The rich and powerful get to live twice as long as the poor and powerless! It’s a goddamned conspiracy of the elite!”

“
And what if it is?
” Godwin shot back. “Plato wrote of the philosopher-king, of the rule of the wise. He understood that our civilization advances and retreats, advances and retreats. We learn lessons only to forget them. History’s tragedies repeat themselves—the Holocaust, and then the genocides that followed, as if we’d all forgotten. World wars. Dictatorships. False messiahs. Oppression of minorities. We don’t seem to
evolve
. But now, for the first time, we can change all that. We can
transform
the human species!”

“How? Your numbers are tiny.” Ben folded his arms on his chest. “That’s another problem with elites.”

Godwin stared at Ben for a moment, then chuckled. “‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’—yes, it all sounds hopelessly inadequate to the grand tasks, right? But humanity doesn’t progress through some process of collective enlightenment. We progress because an individual or small team somewhere makes a breakthrough, and everyone else benefits. Three centuries ago, in a region with a very high rate of illiteracy, one man discovers calculus, or two men do—and the course of our species is changed forever. A century ago, one man discovers relativity, and nothing is ever the same. Tell me, Ben, do you know exactly how an internal combustion engine works—could you assemble one even if I gave you the parts? Do you know how to vulcanize rubber? Of course not, but you benefit from the existence of the automobile all the same. That’s how it works. In the primitive world—I know
we’re not supposed to use those words anymore but indulge me—there’s no great chasm between what one tribesman knows and another. Not so in the Western world. The division of labor is the very mark of civilization: the higher the degree of division of labor, the more advanced the society. And the most important division of labor is the intellectual division of labor. A minuscule number of people worked on the Manhattan Project—and yet the planet was changed by it forever. In the past decade, you had a few small teams decoding the human genome. Never mind that most of humanity can’t remember the difference between Nyquil and niacin—they’ll benefit all the same. People everywhere are using personal computers—people who couldn’t understand a scrap of computer code, don’t know the first thing about integrated circuitry. The mastery belongs to the happy few, and yet the multitudes benefit. The way our species advances isn’t through vast, collective exertions—the Jews building the Pyramids. It’s through individuals, through very small elites, who discover fire, the wheel, or the central processing unit, and thereby change the very landscape of our lives. And what’s true in science and technology can be true of politics, as well. Except the learning curve here takes place over a far longer period of time. Which means that by the time we’ve learned from our errors, we’ve been replaced by younger upstarts who make those errors all over again. We don’t learn enough, because we’re not around long enough. The people who founded Sigma recognized this as an inherent limitation, one that our species would eventually have to overcome if we were to survive. Are you starting to see, Ben?”