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priest who had said yes or no, but now there was a medical ethicist who said the same things. The surgeons emerged from their conference with the ethicist with no joy whatsoever. One child could not be sacrificed for the other. Both lived, or neither, and there was no question that there were two separate children. They had, for example, two quite separate brains. The priest who, just to be safe, baptized them immediately after birth did it twice. There was no question in anyone’s mind that there were two babies there.
By this time there were several physicians involved, all of them aware that a great many people who, believing they were men or women and living acceptable lives as men and women, were actually, genetically speaking, something else again. The deciding factor in cases like these had to be how the parents intended to rear them. The surgeons consulted again. The baby on the right did have sort of a penis, though the urethra opened at the bottom of it, next to his body. Well, that could be fixed. Also, right-hand baby had either testicles that were undescended or ovaries where they belonged, but whichever they were could be moved down and out, as it were, into a scrotum constructed from this and that. This would give righthandbaby a set of masculine-appearing sex organs. With the baby on the left, they could leave the gonads where they were, in the abdomen, and then modify the external complications into an acceptable vulva. There was already a sort of vagina, though it didn’t go anywhere, and an isolated scrap that, from the quantity of nerve tissue, would serve as a clitoris.
“Look,” said Surgeon A to Surgeon B, running his trembling hands across his bald head, “granted, we can come out with some reasonable-looking sex organs, male and female. But, we do this, these persons are going to have a hell of a life. Where’re they going to go to the bathroom, for God’s sake. Whose locker room do they use at school?”
The surgeons attempted to reason with the parents, in the presence of their priest.
“He’s a boy,” said Lek stubbornly. “His name is Bertran.”
“A daughter,” insisted Marla, who was angry with Leksy for getting her into this. Also, she knew in her heart she would never have another child and it was this time or never. “My little Nela.”
“We pray God will bless your knowledge and skill,” said Father Jabowsky, who was convinced that whatever the doctors did was irrelevant, that sexual organs could be dispensed with entirely for they would make no conceivable difference in the next world, which was the only one that mattered.
The surgeons, who thought they would probably be sued if they did and would undoubtedly be sued if they didn’t, bowed to the inevitable, called their attorneys, and had five pounds of waivers generated to be signed by both parents, their parents, and all the relatives they could find. The surgeons who had been recruited to do the work itself were professors emeritus at the medical school, reconstructive surgeons called out of retirement on the theory that by the time the babies themselves got old enough to sue, the doctors would be dead. So far, no one had mentioned malpractice out loud, but no one was taking any chances.
The operations, several of them, were performed. Tissue healed, several times. Time went by. On a fine spring day at St. Seraph’s, the twins were christened Bertran and Nela Korsyzczy, children of Mother Church, inheritors of the faith. Bertran wore a little blue velvet suit with a white lace collar. Nela wore a pink satin dress with an embroidered ruffle at the bottom. Marla held them, beaming with determined cheerfulness. Lek stood at one side, little Bertran’s right hand curledaround one of his big red fingers. Marla kept her mind on all the pretty little dresses she would get to make when Nela started school. Lek was wondering how old his son would have to be before he could start teaching him baseball. He was also resolutely not