As if that meant anything. "Dr. Volescu, the records show that you had twenty-three babies in your organ farm in Rotterdam."
He said nothing.
"But of course that's a lie."
Silence.
"And, oddly enough, I know that the lie is not your idea. Because I know that your installation was not an organ farm indeed, and that the reason you aren't dead is because you agreed to plead guilty to running an organ farm in exchange for never discussing what you were really doing there."
He slowly turned around again. Enough that he could look up and see her with a sidelong glance. "Let me see that clearance you tried to show me before."
She showed it to him again. He studied it.
"What do you know?" he asked.
"I know your real crime was continuing a research project after it was closed down. Because you had these fertilized eggs that had been meticulously altered. You had turned Anton's key. You wanted them to be born. You wanted to see who they would become."
"If you know all that, why have you come to me? Everything I knew is in the documents you must have read."
"Not at all," said Sister Carlotta. "I don't care about confessions. I don't care about logistics. I want to know about the babies."
"They're all dead," he said. "We killed them when we knew we were about to be discovered." He looked at her with bitter defiance. "Yes, infanticide. Twenty-three murders. But since the government couldn't admit that such children had ever existed, I was never charged with the crimes. God judges me, though. God will press the charges. Is that why you're here? Is that who gave you your clearance?"
You make jokes about this? "All I want to know is what you learned about them."
"I learned nothing, there was no time, they were still babies."
"You had them for almost a year. They developed. All the work done since Anton found his key was theoretical. You watched the babies grow."
A slow smile crept across his face. "This is like those Nazi medical crimes all over again. You deplore what I did, but you still want to know the results of my research."
"You monitored their growth. Their health. Their intellectual development."
"We were about to start the tracking of intellectual development. The project wasn't funded, of course, so it's not as if we could provide much more than a clean warm room and basic bodily needs."
"Their bodies, then. Their motor skills."
"Small," he said. "They are born small, they grow slowly. Undersized and underweight, all of them."
"But very bright?"
"Crawling very young. Making pre-speech sounds far earlier than normal. That's all we knew. I didn't see them often myself. I couldn't afford the risk of detection."
"So what was your prognosis?"
"Prognosis?"
"How did you see their future?"
"Dead. That's everyone's future. What are you talking about?"
"If they hadn't been slaughtered, Dr. Volescu, what would have happened?"
"They would have kept on growing, of course."
"And later?"
"There is no later. They keep on growing."
She thought for a moment, trying to process the information.
"That's right, Sister. You're getting it. They grow slowly, but they never stop. That's what Anton's key does. Unlocks the mind because the brain never stops growing. But neither does anything else. The cranium keeps expanding - it's never fully closed. The arms and legs, longer and longer."
"So when they reach adult height ..."
"There is no adult height. There's just height at time of death. You can't keep growing like that forever. There's a reason why evolution builds a stop-clock into the growth control of long-lived bodies. You can't keep growing without some organ giving out, eventually. Usually the heart."
The implications filled Sister Carlotta with dread. "And the rate of this growth? In the children, I mean? How long until they are at normal height for their age?"
"My guess was that they'd catch up twice," said Volescu. "Once just before puberty, and then the normal kids would leap ahead for a while, but slow and steady wins the race, n'est-ce pas? By twenty, they would be giants. And then they'd die, almost certainly before age twenty-five. Do you have any idea how huge they would be? So my killing them, you see - it was a mercy."
"I doubt any of them would have chosen to miss out on even the mere twenty years you took from them."
"They never knew what happened to them. I'm not a monster. We drugged them all. They died in their sleep and