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.