Solomon's Knife

by Victor Koman

  six financially strapped abor-become a symbol of the chang-tion clinics. When transoption ing shape of a new era.

  VALEDICTORY SPEECH

  IS BIG NEWS!

  Local Woman Gets World Coverage

  Exclusive to the Times-Observer

  LOS GATOS-Renata Chandler, Los Gatos High School graduating

  class valedictorian, got more than she bargained for when she delivered her commencement speech yesterday. Under siege of videocams and micro-phones, her words reached a worldwide audience estimated at over one billion.

  Renata is no stranger to the public eye. As the world's first transoptive baby, she has endured eighteen years of public scrutiny. Moving to Los Gatos at age seven, the perky blond kid quickly made friends who have grown up with her and who know how well she has handled her unintentional fame.

  "When that TV movie about her came out, she took it in good stride," said classmate Sally Vanderlaan. "She called it `Womb at the Top' and thought it was hilarious."

  Renata's commencement speech, instead of dealing primarily with the

  challenge the graduating class faces ahead, concentrated on the contribu-tion of previous generations. Her proud first stage and second stage co-parents-Valerie and Ron Czernek and Karen and David Chandler, respec-tively-were in attendance to give their daughter a hearty round of applause. Also on hand was Dr. Evelyn Fletcher, the Nobel Prize-winning surgeon who performed the first transoption over nineteen years ago.

  When commencement ended, Renata dodged reporters to attend the

  prom with J. Philip Nobel, Jr., son of the noted Saratoga News film critic. (See page 3 for complete text of commencement speeches.)

  Commencement Speech

  by Renata V. Chandler

  Los Gatos High School Class Valedictorian

  "Thank you, Ms. Canrinus, faculty, staff, and graduates. Most valedictory speeches consist of platitudes concerning the bright future we have ahead, the daring challenges we'll face, and the solemn responsibility we have to make the world a better place.

  "I stand here today and ask instead that we look back, to thank those in the past who have struggled to do the same. For we are indeed in a world that is a better place. I say that neither with youthful myopia nor comfortable ignorance. I speak as one who knows.

  "Though we can all admit knowledge of this fact, I am the only one in my graduating class who can say this from a par-ticular point of view. Next year there will be three. The year after that, a dozen or more. I would not be here, alive and filled with joy at our future, were it not for eyes that looked at the world and saw the need for change.

  "One person. What a staggering difference one person, one life, can make. One woman decided that death was intoler-able. She saved one life. One tiny, insignificant, nearly invis-ible life. And through that action millions came to be saved. Saved without the oppression of any other human being.

  "As the first of my kind, I've received the lion's share of pub-lic scrutiny. Because of this, though, I cultivated an interest in my kindred spirits. I have sought them out, observed them, and I'm pleased to report that they are coming along nicely. I haven't found out about them all, of course, not even a small fraction. But thanks to the love of life and the devotion to prin-ciples of a significant few of the previous two generations, the human race has welcomed over twenty-two million extra members to its ranks.

  "Twenty-two million is not a great percentage of the eight billion alive today. Every single life, though, matters. I would not be here to say that if one of our elders had not thought so. And every single person can make a difference.

  "We entered the third millennium in a headlong rush to cor-rect the problems of the last twenty centuries. Some said that overpopulation was the cause of all our miseries and sought to suppress reproductive choice. But the wise ones realized that the demon was not a glut of humanity but a dearth of respect for the rights of its members. Who were the wise ones? In retrospect, we can see that they weren't the presidents and kings, the powerful and the established. The wise ones were the mothers who conceived us and gave birth to us or who gave us to another rather than kill us. They were the mothers who received us in our defenseless condition. They were the fathers who loved and protected us. And they were the doc-tors, teachers, relatives, and friends who saw us not as oddi-ties but as mere humans with all the rights and responsibili-ties such an honor bestows.

  "Let us give thanks, then, to those who brought all of us to this point today. To those who gave us birth, no matter how. To those who raised us, taught us, instilled in us the values we hold. And as we go forward into the world they made, let us honor them in the finest way we can: by never slipping back from the frontiers they opened; by understanding the nature of the rights and laws they discovered; and by reaching ever farther beyond their grasp to touch new truths, new worlds, and new freedoms.

  "To all of you through the centuries and eons who lived, labored, struggled, and died to bring us to this point, to deliver us to the threshold of the universe, we take our first step into a world bigger than Earth, and say thank you, thank you, and thank you."

  THE END The Orange County Register Sunday, October 29, 1989

  COMMENTARY/EDITORIALS

  A Novel of Ideas That's a

  Page-Turner

  By Alan W. Bock

  With the decision by the US Supreme Court to allow the states more latitude in regulating abortion, the issue has become, if anything, more contentious and more difficult to resolve in a way that won't leave one side or the other feeling bitter. As so often happens when questions of personal rights are handled in the political arena, we see increasing polarization, accom-panied by a reluctance to concede that the other side has any-thing at all valid to say.

  On the pro-choice side, for example, I've yet to see much evidence of concern that millions of babies-or at least poten-tial babies-are being killed. Yet every woman I know who has wrestled with the question of whether to have an abortion has been personally troubled by just that issue, whatever decision she ultimately made. On the pro-life side, it's difficult to detect much sympathy for women wrestling with this choice. There are honorable exceptions, of course, and an increasing willingness to pro-mote more adoption with deeds as well as words, but many anti-abortion activists seem content to moralize more than sympathize. I suspect that such polarization is always likely in the politi-cal arena. When ultimate questions, those in which compro-mise is very difficult or out of the question, are decided by political means, you usually end up with a winner and a loser. Both sides know this at some level, and tend to become bitter with one another unwilling to concede ally benefit of doubt or moral value to the contentions of the other side. But what if there were a way for babies (or fetuses) to be saved after abortion, implanted in the wombs of willing moth-ers who want babies but are unable to have them, brought to term, born, and raised? Would that change anything, or would the two sides remain polarized?

  Just that possibility is the intriguing premise of a recent Victor Koman. The premise is a bit futuristic, but hardly un-imaginable in a day of test-tube babies, non-surgical ovum transfer, and frozen embryos kept available as potential lives for years. cal novel with characters who seem like real people you can come to care about. Dr. Evelyn Fletcher is a middle-aged doc-tor who had an abortion at 19, regretted it, and devoted her life to trying to develop an alternative that would not involve killing the potential baby. She works for years, and finally be-lieves she has a procedure that will make it possible-remov-ing a fetus intact from a woman who wants an abortion, and implanting it in a woman who wants a baby. But the ethics committee at her hospital refuses to sanction even animal ex-periments, so she continues working in secret.

  Finally she has an opportunity. One couple, Karen and David Chandler, have been trying and failing for years to have a baby by every technique known to modern medicine. Then a young, successful woman with a live-in lover, Valerie Dalton, walks into Fletcher's clinic seeking an abortion. The bl
ood types and other factors match, so Evelyn Fletcher contacts the Chandlers, who immediately agree to try the experiment. It works; seven months later little Renata is born.

  But the baby contracts a rare disorder that requires bone marrow transplants. Only marrow from the genetic mother can save her. Dr. Fletcher contacts Valerie, and eventually the story of what she's done comes out. There's a lawsuit, the Board of Medical Quality Assurance pulls her license, and the whole imbroglio becomes a media event.

  The device of putting a trial, with a sharp lawyer on each side, at the center of the story facilitates both a careful exposi-tion of various sides of the issues raised and intelligent chal-lenges to each point of view. As the issues are explained, de-bated, and refined, several characters actually change their minds about the value of the procedure Dr. Fletcher dubs "transoption." Over the course of the book, a careful analysis of the valid rights of various parties involved in decisions about pregnancy emerges. But this is far from a dry-as-dust philosophical tome. feelings about, since it kept me up reading a couple of nights when I should have been in bed. Victor Koman has managed to fuse a serious, fair-minded, and sensitive explication of one of the more emotional issues of our time with a page-turner of a story.

  Southern California readers will especially enjoy the evoca-tion of our area through telling and accurate descriptive de-tails. The descriptions of medical procedures reflect painstak-ing homework. Transoption is obviously a fictional procedure, but as pre-sented in this book it's just plausible enough to make you think it could be developed. Whether it would end up defusing the abortion issue or simply serve as another focus for hostility is a question to which I can't pretend to have an answer. But Koman's novel will not only entertain readers, it will help those on all sides of the abortion issue clarify their thinking.

  Mr. Bock is the Register's senior columnist.

  Medical Novels:

  Double Dose of Fear

  By Brad Linaweaver

  Special to the Journal-Constitution different kind. ...Mr. Koman offers a courtroom drama that focuses on one of the most controversial issues of our time.

  With the recent Supreme Court decision sure to rekindle nating questions. What if one day a woman goes to the hospi-tal to have an abortion and is asked to sign a pregnancy termi-nation contract? What if the doctor who removes the unwanted fetus, in compliance with the contract, then transplants the fetus to another woman who has desperately been trying to get pregnant but has found no viable method until now? What if technology renders abortion an obsolete technique?

  Transoption is the term Mr. Koman gives to this operation. The breakthrough is based upon a method by which any woman's womb can be made hospitable to any fetus.

  Mr. Koman develops the idea in high romantic style. The doctor who performs the unauthorized surgery is Dr. Evelyn Fletcher, one of the best realized characters this reviewer has ever seen. Condemned by some as a Frankenstein, hailed by others as a saint, she undergoes the torment that has always been the reward for medical trailblazing.

  The ethical time bomb is set off after the birth of the trans-planted baby. It is discovered that the child needs a bone mar-row transplant from her original mother. Secrecy can no longer be maintained. The mother agrees to save the infant but is persuaded by a litigious boyfriend to sue for custody. The most dramatic portion of the book covers the courtroom battles over Baby Renata and the accompanying protests. There is real brilliance here. Mr. Koman shows how transoption would lead to rifts and new alliances in the abortion wars.

  He posits that the march of science could make possible the first pro-choice/pro-life alliance among those who will see transoption as a boon. But he does not avoid the satirical im-plications either: There is a second alliance of pro-choice and anti-abortion forces who oppose giving women this particular alternative, the first for political reasons, the latter for reli-gious ones. Before this gripping novel ends, Dr. Fletcher must put up with being called a Nazi by overheated partisans of both left and right. Mr. Koman is asking those who would defend life or choice to really think about what the words mean.

  It does not ruin the denouement to praise Mr. Koman for his demonstration, both intellectually and emotionally, of what it will mean to the world when there are literal co-mothers. can do: it gives us a new context.

  Brad Linaweaver is the author of Moon of Ice and The Land Beyond Summer. About the Author

  Victor Koman is the author of eight novels and is at this moment working on his ninth. A native Californian, Koman wrote the underground classic millennial-noir novel The Je-novels won the Prometheus Award in their respective years.

  The Jehovah Contract was written in 1978 and '79. It was first published in 1985 - in Bavaria (by publisher Heyne Verlag) - as a German language paperback titled Der Jehova-Vertrag. Ray Bradbury says of Koman's first novel, "The Jeho-vah Contract has a fascinating concept, imaginatively delivered," and of Koman, "Would that there were a dozen more 1988. Politically potent, it is a medical thriller and courtroom drama that shatters the moribund philosophies clinging to the abortion dilemma and creates a radical fusion of Pro-Life and Pro-Choice forces when a new medical technique threatens to make abortion obsolete. Franklin Watts published the hard-cover in 1989 and it won the Prometheus Award (making Koman the first two-time winner) in 1990. A German transla-tion, Der Eingriff, came out in 1991 from Goldmann Verlag. He co-wrote (with Andrew J. Offutt), two novels in the Spaceways saga: #13, Jonuta Rising! and #17, The Carnadyne Horde, published by Berkley Books in 1983 and 1984. Both were issued under the house name "John Cleve."

  Koman's short story "Bootstrap Enterprise" appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and was noted by critic Ellen Datlow as one of the best stories of 1994. His stories have also appeared in Fred Olen Ray's Weird Menace, Paul Sammon's The King is Dead - Tales of Elvis Postmortem, Ed Kramer's Dark Destiny II and Dark Destiny III, as well as Kramer's and Brad Linaweaver's Free Space.

  His novel, Kings of the High Frontier, won the Prometheus Award in 1997, making him the first three-time winner of the solid-gold prize. The novel was the first exclusively Web-avail-able novel to win such an award...and went on to earn a spot on the Preliminary Ballot for the Science-Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's prestigious Nebula Award.

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction calls Kings "an intriguing, exhilarating, thought-provoking and, yes, sprawl-ing novel that brings back the sense of wonder that drew so many of us into science-fiction in the first place."

  A community activist with a quixotic sense of what's impor-tant, Koman was instrumental in preventing the destruction of Disneyland's last bubble-topped Mark III monorail ("Old Red"), generating a one-man public relations campaign that resulted in nationwide news coverage. The Walt Disney Company subsequently saved, restored, and converted the historic monorail fuselage into a street-legal promotional vehicle. Koman has also appeared as an extra in several films, includ-ing Star Trek - The Motion Picture, CyberZone, Nightshade, Rapid Assault, Mom's Outta Sight, X-Ray Kid, Billy Frankenstein, and Little Miss Magic (in which his actress daughter, Vanessa Koman, played the title role). He lives in southern California with his wife, Veronica, and daughter, Vanessa, as well as their cat and goldfish.

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