Solomon's Knife

by Victor Koman

  "Do you and Dr. Fletcher work very closely?" she asked im-pulsively.

  "I'm her right hand," Dyer replied with brusque formality. "Please roll on your side into a fe-Into a curled-up position."

  She curled up as requested, sensing the hostility. "She didn't really do it for the money, did she?"

  "No more," Dyer said, "than I presume you're suing her for the money. She did it because it was right. Knees up toward your chest."

  Valerie knew the dangers of anatagonizing a nurse. Dyer exposed the patient's back, swabbing a small patch high on the back with Betadine.

  "How could she be so sure it was right," Valerie asked, "if she never sought the opinion of other doctors?"

  Dyer snorted. "If she couldn't figure out on her own whether it was right or wrong, how could any other doctor or group of doctors? She knew at the outset what she wanted. And she worked for years finding a way to do it. That's what nobody seems to see. It's not as if she stumbled onto transoption in an old book and thought, `Gee, let's try it.'"

  "Drugs, anyone?" The door to the room opened, pushed by a rolling cart maneuvered by a smiling older man in greens, surgical gown, and cap. Sallow but cheerful, his face regained decorum when he saw the two serious gazes turned his way.

  "Riiight," he said with a pronounced drawl. "Dyer." He nod-ded curtly in her direction while pulling on a double pair of surgical gloves.

  "Tom." A reply just as curt.

  "How're you feeling?" he asked the patient as his cool gloved fingers explored her upper spine.

  "I'm ready."

  "Fine. I'm going to give you a high spinal block. That'll numb you from the neck down." She could not see what he was doing from her position, but she heard the sounds of instruments and bottles clattering gently on the tray.

  "Okay, Valerie." He pressed his thumb between two verte-brae. "I'm going to poke you right there. It's very important that you don't move. Just relax." He dabbed something cool on the spot. "Juuust relax."

  Her first reflex was to flinch, but she resisted the urge. The sting was not nearly as bad as she had feared, but to think about what he was doing made her want to shudder. She thought instead about the clouds rolling in over Lunada Bay in the winter. About the fog that sometimes filled the cove so that one could stand on the bluffs and not see the ocean churn-ing a scant hundred feet below the cliff. In all of L.A. nothing was more like a seaside village to her. It soothed her.

  Something had gone quite wrong with her hands. They tingled.

  "Very good," the voice drawled. Something tugged out of her back. "Let's roll her over." Nurse Dyer pulled at her legs, though she felt nothing but a sensation of pressure and a vague tingling that diminished quickly into an eerie numbness from the neck down. Looking up, she saw Dr. Fletcher gazing at her. She hadn't heard her come in. Gowned, gloved, capped, and masked, as was Dyer, now, she nodded to Valerie and said, "Remember what I told you. Just relax and think about pleasant things." Valerie nodded, looking up to concentrate on the spot. It seemed to scintillate a bit. A motion at the side of her head caused her to turn. The anesthetist taped a capsule of smell-ing salts to the pillow. She was fairly certain that it was for her, but for a moment she wondered.

  Nurse Dyer brought forward a cart with the aspiration de-vice. It hissed in much the same way the suction device had. Grasping a large, long needle attached to clear silicone plastic tubing, Fletcher hovered over Valerie's exposed sternum. Po-sitioning the needle squarely on the midline between her patient's breasts, she leaned on the device and gave it a hearty, firm push. Valerie felt only the pressure of something against her chest. The aspirator make a sucking noise. That was when the pain hit her. She tried to visualize the cliffs on Oahu's windward side where she and Ron had flown kites on their vacation two years back. It wasn't working.

  Another shove. Again the needle pierced skin, muscle, and bone. Another gasp from the machine. Another lance of sear-ing agony. Valerie chanced to gaze downward to see a clump of thick, dark-red glop slowly moving halfway up the tube. Needle out, reposition, push hard. She felt no sting but heard the faintest of crunches underneath the sound of the pump. The pain came with aspiration. How long would this go on?

  She felt a panic overwhelm her. There must be some other way to help Renata. She'd donate a thousand pints of blood just to be free of the spike that plunged into her chest every few seconds. Sweat beaded up on her face. She watched the spot overhead waver, turn grey.

  A hand stroked at her hair. Looking to the side, her gaze met Nurse Dyer's. Above her mask, her eyes revealed a com-passion Valerie hadn't seen before. The nurse's gloved hand tenderly stroked her long blond hair. "Be brave," she whis-pered. "This is the only way to save Renata. Your daughter's counting on you."

  Tears leaked out of Valerie's eyes. Dyer picked up a piece of gauze to dab at them, all the while stroking her head. "You've a great deal of courage," she said. "The courage to do right no matter what the-"

  "Gauze," Dr. Fletcher said quietly.

  Dyer stopped stroking Valerie and assisted the doctor. Fletcher continued to probe, drive home the needle, and aspi-rate the bone-marrow.

  Where would it end? Valerie wondered. Not just the opera-tion. All of it. The needle punctured her, inches from her heart.

  XII

  Terry Johnson sat on the brushed grey fabric couch in the reception area of Women for Reproductive Freedom, reading their position paper on surrogate mothering. Before he could get more than a few paragraphs into it, the woman at the desk, who looked as if she had just stepped out of Cosmopolitan, said, "Ms. Burke will see you now."

  Johnson followed the woman to an austere office that, though spacious, contained little more than a large mahogany desk, executive chair, two conference chairs, and a matched pair of Jackson Pollock paintings. A trio of woodgrain-painted metal filing cabinets stood to one side. There were no bookcases. Jane Burke stepped in a moment later. She was of moderate height, though she seemed taller due to her high-heeled pumps. They were purple and perfectly matched to the suit she wore. On her lapel, a gold Venus symbol, surmounted by two slender hands clasping, indicated that she was a member of the Sisters Network, a sororal order of female executives. Her brown hair was full-bodied, permed, and businesslike. Behind her aviator-style glasses, she could have been a mid-forties executive at any Fortune 500 company whose old-boy network had relinquished control to the new-woman network.

  "What's up, Mr. Johnson?" She sat behind her desk, smiling courteously. Realizing that she favored brevity, he jumped immediately to the point. "I am representing Dr. Evelyn Fletcher in the Baby Renata case. I'd like to enlist your assistance as an expert wit-ness for the defendants." He paused to await a reply, received none, and continued. "This case is certain to be a landmark in human rights, and I knew you would be interested in having a part in the outcome." Burke leaned back in her chair, peaked her fingers, and watched Johnson with a cool, noncommittal gaze.

  "As a champion of freedom of choice," he continued, "I knew you'd be the person to speak out on this issue from a feminist viewpoint."

  "Oh," Burke said with a smile, "I plan to. You see, I've al-ready volunteered to be an expert witness for the plaintiff."

  Johnson's jaw dropped. Trying to recover, he stammered in disbelief. The words caught somewhere down inside him and refused to escape in any intelligible form.

  "If you're that composed in court," Burke said, lowering her hands, "perhaps your client should leave the country tonight."

  "How can you be on the plaintiff's side?" he demanded. His voice cracked at the end in an almost boyish squeak. "How can you be opposed to a technique that gives women a new option in birth control?"

  Her smile faded to a glare of undisguised contempt. "A new option? What good has any sex technology done for women? Did contraceptives liberate women? No. They merely allowed men to demand more sex of women without the burden and responsibility of fatherhood." She leaned forward, one elbow on the desk. "Women didn't invent contraceptives, you
know. Men did. For camels. They applied those methods to women with the same lack of regard for their health and well-being."

  "Well," Johnson said warily, "I don't know about that, but transoption seems to be a way for a woman to rid herself of a pregnancy while freeing her from the guilt feelings associ-"

  "Don't try to convince me that this latest medical meddling frees women. Not when I've seen women injured and killed by IUDs, pills, and botched abortions. You won't get me to say that it's anything more than a scheme to turn women into in-terchangeable breeding units so that one womb is no more important than any other." She smiled stonily and leaned back in her chair. "Do you know where embryo-transfer research began, Mr. Johnson?"

  "I think you'll tell me."

  "It began with cattle breeding. And that is what this male technology seeks to reduce us to."

  "Evelyn Fletcher is a woman."

  Burke's glare deepened. "And she's doing a man's work, the traitor. I haven't met a female doctor yet who hasn't been spayed by the act of attending medical school. I'll make sure that she receives no sympathy from the women she's betrayed."

  The lawyer stared at Burke for a long moment, his sensibili-ties rocked by the unexpected hostility.

  "How-" He stopped to think. "If you consider all medical technology to be anti-woman, why does your organization so fervently support le-galized abortion?"

  Her expression retreated ever so slightly to one of cautious reserve. "Because," she said, "no matter how it has been abused, abortion still allows a woman to have final, absolute control over what becomes of part of her body-something this transoption madness would destroy."

  "I see." He didn't, really, but he knew wasted effort when he stared it in the face. Burke smiled a crooked, nearly impish smile. "Why don't you trot over to Avery Decker?" Her tone bordered on sarcasm. "Protecting blobs of protoplasm is his holy mission."

  "He was next on my list," Johnson said.

  "

  Since Jane Burke and Pastor Avery Decker were diametri-cally opposed on the abortion issue, Johnson expected his meeting with the fundamentalist minister to be much less strained and much more productive than his run-in with the feminist. He mulled her arguments on the drive from Santa Monica over to Decker's Tustin office. Passing Disneyland's Matterhorn on Interstate 5, its artificial snow resisting the afternoon's heat, he wondered at the woman's position. Was her outlook the norm? Why did she support abortion but op-pose transoption? They both ended pregnancy in exactly the same way. Wasn't that what they were after-the right to ex-pel an unwanted fetus? Why should she care what became of it afterward?

  His lawyer's mind filed the question away. If he was to meet her on the other side of the lawsuit, it might be worth bringing up. He ran through possible cross-examination scenarios in his mind, trying to anticipate her responses to certain ques-tions, forming his counterresponses. He missed the Tustin exits entirely.

  Five miles of backtracking brought him to the new office building situated under the approach path to the marine heli-copter air station. A huge Sikorsky Skycrane thundered over-head, with basso pulsations that rumbled straight through Johnson's guts. The slamming of his car door faded to inaudibility amidst the roar. He watched the copter descend toward the airfield. The noise level dropped abruptly, though a throbbing, ringing sound lin-gered in his ears.

  The building was only two stories high, the offices of the Committee for Preborn Rights occupying the second floor. Johnson glanced at his watch and bounded up the stairs.

  "Sorry I'm late," he announced to the elderly woman at the reception desk. "I'm Terry Johnson. I have an appointment with-"

  "Yes, young man. Please step right in." She gestured with an age-spotted hand toward a frosted glass door.

  Pastor Avery Decker stood when Johnson entered. He ex-tended a chubby hand to the taller, younger man. The fluores-cent light overhead reflected from his balding pate, seeming to wink at Johnson along with the minister's twinkling eyes.

  "Greetings, Mr. Johnson. I'm Avery Decker, this is James Rosen." He indicated a young, intense man standing by a book-case in the bright room. Tall and darkly handsome, he seemed more suited to the Colonial furnishings than did the overweight middle-aged preacher. "Jim's my assistant and legal advisor. I hope you don't mind his sitting in on this meeting."

  "Not at all." Johnson shook Rosen's hand, making the usual small-talk introductions.

  "Won't you have a seat?" Rosen pointed to a well-stuffed wing chair. Johnson eased happily into the soft leather recesses. This, at least, was a warmer reception than Burke had given him.

  Rosen sat in a chair off to Decker's right. He watched Johnson with a studied alertness that marked him as more of a body-guard than an assistant. It made sense. Decker was a hated man.

  "You know," Decker began, leaning back in his swivel chair and placing his hands in his pockets,

  "when I spoke to you on the phone, I wasn't too aware of what this whole transoption thing was about. I had Jim, here, do what he does with his computer and search the AP news wire to get us up to date." He tapped at a thin stack of printout on his desk. "I don't like it. Not one bit. I'm afraid the answer has to be no."

  Johnson dove right in, unwilling to lose the argument to slow response. "I don't know what's in there, but the truth of the matter is that Dr. Fletcher has found a way to save the lives of fet-of preborns and she's being persecuted for rescuing a defenseless victim of abortion."

  "And who did the aborting, Mr. Johnson? She didn't just stumble across this `victim.' She created it in the first place. If she had refused to perform abortions, this new technique would be unnecessary."

  "Oh, come on!" A strange anger grew inside Johnson. "Women would just go to some other doctor, and the preborns would still be aborted and dead, and the problem would re-main. Is that what you'd prefer?"

  "We'd prefer," Rosen said, "that all the doctors obey their Hippocratic-or is it hypocritic-oath and

  `not aid a woman to procure abortion.' A very simple solution-just say no."

  "You can't expect that," Johnson said with a sharpness that surprised him. Why are they acting like the enemy, too? "Some women will always need abortions and there will always be a market to perform them. Dr. Fletcher has found a way to give women what they want and yet save the babies. Isn't that what you're fighting for?"

  Decker cleared his throat and put his hands on the desk, clasping them as if in prayer. "What we're fighting for, Mr. Johnson, is an end to all interference with God's plan. If God had wanted that baby to be born inside of Mrs. Chandler, he wouldn't have needed Dr. Fletcher to act as a go-between. It's not just a preborn's right to life we're struggling to defend here. It's the right to live and be born according to God's will. Any-thing that disrupts or interferes with that plan-be it abortion or contraception or transoption-is contrary to God's holy plan."

  "I suppose adoption is evil, too?"

  Decker smiled with condescending patience. "I would say that it is the least of many evils, the minimum in a wide spec-trum of meddling in God's will."

  "You'd outlaw that, too?" Johnson leaned forward a few inches, as if the increased closeness could deepen his under-standing of Decker's position.

  "We don't seek to outlaw anything," Rosen interjected in a calm, conversational tone. "What we seek is a world in which evil actions are never chosen. We don't fool ourselves that it's going to be an easy, overnight task. Caesar's laws are only a temporary expedient toward the implementation of God's law." Johnson looked from Rosen to Decker. "And are you the in-fallible interpreters of God's plans?" The minister smiled. "I never laid claim to such an honor."

  "Then perhaps," Johnson said, "there's a slim chance-how-ever inscrutable to you-that Dr. Fletcher is part of God's plan and you are just too bullheaded to see it." He rose to leave. Decker spoke to Johnson's departing back. "If the plaintiff doesn't accept my offer to appear on her behalf, I'll be making our position clearer in the amicus we'll be filing."

  "Thanks for noth
ing" was the sharpest retort Johnson could summon. He slammed the door with unprofessional force and strode angrily to his car. As a pair of Huey Cobras whined a few thousand feet away, his brain burned with fury and in-comprehension.

  What was going wrong? Everything had seemed so clear and logical to him just that morning. Pro-lifers say abortion is murder; pro-choicers say forced motherhood is slavery. A doc-tor finds a way to end pregnancies without killing the fetus. Why weren't both sides of the issue rushing to her aid?

  Where was the united front he'd hoped to present? Why wasn't either side burning with rage at the persecution of a maverick scientist?

  He sat in the car amid the noise and doubted his own ability to present his case cogently. Maybe I just wasn't making my-self clear enough. Maybe I'm just going to submarine the entire case by... He took a deep breath. He wasn't going to let such juvenile fears force him to give up the case. He knew what another more experienced lawyer would do: demur to the complaint, delay, argue trivial points of law, find loopholes, delay and at-tempt a settlement. That wasn't what he wanted. Johnson wondered what it was he did want. In his fury at the dual snubbings, he realized what it was. He wanted to blow the whole abortion issue to pieces. Decker and Burke. They're both petrified that transoption would put an end to their cru-sades. And they're both too lazy to find new evils to battle or just give up and get along, so they continue to fight each other and gang up on anyone who threatens to wage peace.

  He gazed up at the warbirds circling overhead. He felt that he had a tenuous grasp on some deeper wisdom. Something that could apply to more than just a custody trial.

  The trial.

  He keyed the ignition and floored the accelerator. He had thirty days to answer or demur. The game, though, had to be won right now, in the blaze of publicity.

  He grinned with feral glee as tires squealed. He'd confuse Czernek by answering the complaint today and pushing for the earliest trial date possible, based on urgency.