(urth) Short Story 93: Procreation

[Marc Aramini]

Procreation

Procreation first appeared in its entirety in 1985 in The Fourth Omni Book
of Science Fiction and is recollected in *Endangered Species*.

SUMMARY:

Section I: Creation –

The story place as Gene’s journal over the course of a week, starting on
August 1, a Monday, as Gott’s remarks on the universe containing only one
monopole inspire Gene to shoot particles at “Nothing” in an electron
accelerator, at which point he produces something. By the third day he asks
his wife and sister how they would feel about being related to a Nobel
Laureate, and he returns to the lab to discover that gravity separates
moisture from solids in the pyramidal shape that has formed in the
microverse he created. He seeds it with scrapings from the apple his sister
put in his lunch, and then from tissue samples from the biology lab. The
next day Gene sees large microorganisms and spore pods in his creation and
even puts a scraping of himself into the microverse, then scrapes the
“little critter” that resulted to produce another, “much the same”. On the
seventh day, a Sunday, Gene opts not to go to the campus and is nagged
about church by his wife. Instead, he sleeps late and watches baseball. His
sister makes drawings to describe how the microverse originated, “starting
with the arc discharge and ending with me watching the Yankees drop one to
the Angels.” They reduce it with a copier, and as he goes to place the
document in, he sees that the “critters” are eating the spore pods, so he
scares them off by putting a fruitfly in the microverse. They write their
names on the cover of the book they create, “Gene” and “Sis”, before
dropping it in.

Section II: Recreation

The journal of Gene picks up on the 1st of September. He turns the
microverse over to Dr. Ramakrishna of the astronomy department, and says
“we will eventually have to draw some sort of line between their claims to
new universes and ours.” The astronomists say the new universe is outside
the solar system and headed to Vega, even showing a red shift (see
scientific allusions below). The next day he receives an airmail letter
from Dr. John Cramer saying that Gene might have created a net magnetic
charge – that if Gene-eration (which Gene calls his microverse) was seeded
by a north monopole, there must be a south monopole. He calls it
“Sis-eration” after his sister, who he claims “was [his] sounding board for
the first one.” He says it is apt because “sis” is a palindrome running the
same forwards and backwards, and the time in Sis-eration might run
backwards, destroyed at the moment Gene-eration was created. On Saturday he
goes to look for Sis-eration and says that his own universe was seeded by a
monopole, with a resulting net magnetic charge, so Sis-eration is mythical,
“the Atlantis of physics”.

On the next day as he is at church with Martha, he has a “waking dream”
during the sermon and remembers a vision he had the previous day of a
floater in his eye, and saw it explode into the Big Bang, calling it the
“primordial supersun the old philosophers called the Ylem – saw it open
like a milkweed pod and scatter the galaxies.” He realizes that he did not
remember it until he was sitting in church – “my subconscious must have
decided it was irrational and blocked it out completely.” He considers what
else he might have lost because of it. The fifth day he considers how
matter and anti-matter could be separated, thinking that perhaps their
innate physical properties would create the separation, ultimately
producing a surplus of hydrogen, with its single proton. On the sixth day
Ramakrishna tells him that Gene-eration has shifted into the infra-red. He
tells Ramakrishna to think of the Big Bang like a Big Blossom, with matter
slowly picking up speed as it accelerates from its origin. On the next day
he remembers visiting Sis-eration as a child, something he couldn’t
possibly have forgotten, and it disturbs him. “It was created when I
performed my experiment, and it’s propagating through our past. What will
it do to us? Got to talk this over with Sis. But I can’t – what if I’m
really crazy?”

Section III: The Sister’s Account

Here, Gene’s sister reveals that she and Gene have visited a different
universe several times, once when they were children on a camping trip in
the Sierras as they searched for a spring, suddenly seeing land masses
thrust above a desert landscape, until they came to water, where Sis saw
their tent and family reflected on every wave. They return to the “real”
world, and later, in high school, they are exploring tide pools when Sis
sees giant trees under the water, and the tenth one opens to reveal a
beckoning family consisting of a husband, wife, and child, who try to
communicate through some kind of drawing or paper. Sis believe the father
is trying to explain that they live underneath the surface so that the
trees and deer can exist above ground, and then the woman opens up a
crumpled mirror that allow Sis to see the real world reflected again, so
that they can return. As an older woman, “when Gene had married and it was
clear [Sis] never would”, she once again visits the world by peering
through the vanity in her bedroom beyond her reflected face to see the sea.
The sun is hotter than before, with life on the beach, and she “understood
that all three had been one world, and that in [her] own short life [she]
had seen its senility and flower, and now [she] saw its beginning.”

She sees her bed reflected in the pools, the coverlet spread for the repose
of her rag doll. In the present of her story, she finds the letter from Dr.
Cramer warning of the dangers of the net magnetic charge, saying there must
be a second universe. She believes Dr. Cramer is correct, but now when she
looks in the mirror she sees only her own face, for Sis-eration disappeared
at the creation of Gene’s universe. She concludes by thinking that perhaps
the second universe was “ours”, “and it is we who are gone, leaving as our
only trace these words upon a printed page.”

COMMENTARY: There is a kind of eclectic catch-all nature to procreation
that throws religion, science, metafiction, myth, and even a kind of bitter
irony at play throughout “Procreation”. At the end, there are a few major
thematic questions that we are forced to ask: is the universe that Gene
created actually distinct from ours even though it exists “within” it?
Before we confront this level of the text or get into the easier mapping of
religious allusions to the first section, we should comment that the final
subjective section, “The Sister’s Account”, varies significantly from the
previous two, as it covers three events over the course of her life which
sound much more like the fantasy or myth than the journal entries.

Each visit to the strange world which Gene has “forgotten” involves either
water or a reflection of Sis that serves as the gateway in both directions,
as once Sis is inside the other reality she can see the “real” world in
reflections. While at first I wanted to explore the idea that there was
some kind of waveform representation of reality moving through the other
universe, the mirror that she uses to transport herself the final time
prompted me to believe that it is the reflective property itself which
allows her to be aware of the other reality, and that every trip involves
Sis looking at these reflective surfaces. When Sis is young, the world is
old. When Sis is old, the world is beginning. In this way, it seems that
Sis is actually one side of the monopole that joins the creation of Gene
with this universe. (Whether they were actually travelling into Sis-eration
or Gene-eration is a bit confusing, and we will return to that question).
When Gene calls Sis-eration mythical, the Atlantis of physics, it rings
eerily true – the presentation we get of a lost world seems extremely
mythical in nature, with tree spirits and weird reflective mirrors and
waves that serve as conduits to the real world. Ultimately, it seems that
Sis is the conduit to this world, and it is entirely possible that Sis,
too, has been created in Gene’s Gene-eration, giving him a sister that
serves as the opposite monopole to his creation backwards in time. Indeed,
there is a throwaway line in the first section, that Sis someday plans to
put her own genetic material into the microverse - perhaps the presence of
Sis in the universe proper is the result of this insertion in a strangely
twisted fashion.

The first section, “Creation”, is straightforward enough, with the mapping
of the Biblical story of Genesis onto Gene’s experiment. While this
fictional Gene might bear some resemblance to ours as a creator of vast
universes, the metafiction at play here is distinct from “The Last
Thrilling Wonder Story” – this time Gene seems to succeed in being the God
of his universe. (Obviously our Gene Wolfe never had a wife named Martha,
nor a sister, though I think the presence of the sister is a bit more
mysterious than a first reading indicates.) The wife, Martha, whose name
implies bitterness (pretty consistent pattern in Wolfe’s work in the 1980s)
criticizes everything, while the sister supports him.

The second section seems to describe the cosmological complications of
physics and science in the tale of creation, thus the name “Recreation” –
the microverse is placed in the universe itself, and the concept of ylem
and the scientific explanation of a Big Bang/Big Blossom are confronted. No
doubt this mirrors some of the problems religion faced when science became
sufficiently advanced to offer alternative explanations for the existence
of the universe.

Creation is the easiest section to explain – after being inspired by
physicist named Gott’s work about the monopole (Gott means “good” or ”God”,
but almost certainly refers to the real astrophysicist J Richard Gott),
Gene creates his universe in seven days which map to the days of creation.
On Monday, Gene has a “flash of insight” – this is analogous to the “let
there be light” concept of the first day. He shoots electrons at “Nothing”
to see if there is attraction or repulsion, and gets electrons and a few
positrons. On day 2 a dark spot of water with heavy stuff settling mirrors
the separation of the waters above from the waters below in Genesis. On day
3, the gravity of our universe separates the sea from the land. On Day 4
the light that Gene rigs in his lab is the light of the sun and celestial
bodies, and the spherical shape is the earth taking shape as a sphere.

Gene determines that even though gravity is shared in the universes, space
is relative – the microverse grows and develops but takes up no more space
in his universe. The scrapings on day 5 are of course the vegetable and
animal species which will populate the earth in Genesis, and on day 6 Gene
scrapes his own wrist to create another Adam in his image before taking a
culture from it and producing its mate, as Eve was taken from Adam. This is
where the story conflates the two separate creation myths present in
Genesis (one with the celestial breakdown of the days found in Chapter 1
and the other with the personal story of Adam and Eve and their trespass in
the Garden which begins in Chapter 2). The idea of a fruitfly as the
cherubim keeping Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden is one of the more
memorable conceits of the story, and it is equally absurd that the deity of
Gene-eration “rests” from church by catching a game between the Yankees and
the Angels. We should think about the title of the universe and the story
as a whole: a play on generation and procreation, which usually involves a
seed and an egg to quicken into life.

The constant multiplication of dimensions, from a pyramidal to cubical
shape to one that is spherical, might also prompts the inception of time
inside the closed system as well, and it is clear that the microverse, even
though it grows, always takes up the same amount of space in the universe
of Gene, though it exhibits relativistic effects on anything which enters
it (affecting the size of the ruler, for example).

The presence of Sis at home with Gene as he watches baseball while his wife
goes to Church seems odd, and she seems to live with Gene as well. Martha
and she are parenthetically paired early in the first story: “Told Sis,
Martha, How'd you like to say, 'My brother (husband) the Nobel Laureate?'”.
Later, he thinks, “Suppose somebody (Martha) finds this? I'd be locked
away,” after which he is certain that he can't speak to Sis about it.

Section II, “Recreation”, complicates the rather simple pastiche of Genesis
that adequately explains the first section. Gene turns over his universe to
the physics department under Dr. Ramakrishna where “We will eventually have
to draw some sort of line between their claims to new universes and ours.”
In addition to representing the scientific view of the universe and its
inception which challenged the accepted creation story historically, the
allusions become rather heavy in this section. Ramakrishna’s name itself is
certainly famous – Ramakrishna is the 19th century Indian mystic and
spiritualist who ultimately said that all paths led to God. The red shift
of the universe shows that it is retreating, but the changing wavelength
may also have something to do with the representation of waves as a conduit
between the mythical and real world found in “The Sister’s Account”.
Section II is primarily concerned with Gene’s search for Sis-eration and
realizing that his memories are faulty, but it also deals heavily with
physics and physical reality. Day 5 talks about atoms and anti-atoms,
considering how they might interact and segregate themselves, while when an
atom meets another of the same type “there’s no bounce”. Somehow the
relationship between Gene, Sis, Gene-eration, and Sis-eration must be
related to this talk of matter and anti-matter.

The sister’s account reverts to a more personal, fantasy story that has
none of the scientific objectivity that the first two portions contained.
Gene’s explanations mirrored religious and scientific concepts of the start
of the universe, but the sister’s account is entirely personal in nature,
resembling the fantasies that it mentions at the start. However, it does
present a waveform vision of reality: Sis can see her parents “quite
clearly in the lifted surface of every wave … just as if I were seeing the
same picture again and again in the TVs in a department store.” This
waveform concept of reality is repeated when they look at their footprints:
“all the footprints pointed away from the tent, as though we had walked
into the spring and swum into the earth. Later, in a high school trip to
tide pools, Sis looks into waves and sees something that seems like trees
beyond the bottom of the pool she found. In the tenth tree that they pass,
a man comes out and beckons them into his underground lair. They return to
their own existence when a crumpled mirror is opened and they see
themselves in it. Any reflective surface winds up being a gateway through
the universes for Sis.

In the final analysis I think the hint that Sis plans on putting her own
material into the creation of Gene, along with the final musing that the
universe created was somehow ours, not only plays with the metafictional
awareness that Sis and Gene are in fact in Gene's story, but with the
cosmological idea that, at least in the story, somehow the magnetic
monopole has created a universe which might even be the one contained
inside it, with Sis' existence acting as the seed of another, opposite
universe – perhaps even propagating her existence backwards into Gene's
reality.

SCIENTIFIC REFERENCES

Scientific references abound in this one, and some research into them is
actually quite astonishing.

The monopole is simply the idea that, even though in nature magnets have a
positive and negative side, even when broken into smaller pieces, charges
exist in subatomic particles – the monopole would always have only a
positive or negative charge no matter how it was split.

John Cramer is a real professor of physics at the University of Washington
who also occasionally writes a column for Analog, and fascinatingly enough
he proposed (as far as I could tell in 1986) quantum exchanges and
interactions as a wave formed by both “forward-in-time" retarded waves and
advanced "backward-in-time" waves. The fantasy section of “The Sister’s
Account” seems to play with the idea of waves going forward and backward in
time in that fashion, perhaps entering a quantum universe, and her account
ends by quoting a fictional letter from Dr. Cramer to Gene: “You must
surely have made a pair, a ‘north’ monopole and a ‘south’ monopole.
Otherwise you would have created a net magnetic charge, which is a no-no. …
The one you describe must be like ours, but the other should contain
antimatter and have time running in reverse.” Since this story was at least
started in 1983 before being finished in 1985, perhaps the waveforms moving
forward and backward in time that are given artistic expression as the
reflection of Sis are merely coincidence, but it is a rather striking one.

The ylem that Gene remembers seeing on his eyes while he is at church was
coined as a concept in the late 1940s, a kind of primordial plasma
undergoing a kind of synthesis into matter besides Hydrogen. The radiation
released from this Big Bang can still be seen as cosmic microwave
background radiation, a pervasive light that does not originate from
celestial bodies, but rather from the inception of the universe.

The redshift that the microverse creates happens when light or other
electromagnetic radiation increases in wavelength, become “redder” by
moving towards that end of the color wavelength spectrum. This is
equivalent to a lower frequency and photon energy, which might have some
relevance since Sis sees reality repeated through the waves of the ocean on
the other world.

The question is whether the Gott referenced in the text is actually the
Princeton astrophysicist J Richard Gott, who had published several papers
by the 1970s, or merely a play on the meaning of Gott – God. I believe the
1982 paper in *Nature* titled “The Creation of Open Universes from Desitter
Space” attracted Gene's attention. Gott’s science would be particularly
interesting to Wolfe, because he explores the possibility of time travel,
and even states in an interview, “Certainly in the subatomic world,
particles called positrons look like they might actually be electrons
traveling backward in time.” This is fascinating in light of the first day
of the experiment, when Gene shoots the electrons at nothing and produces
electrons and a few positrons – has he locally reversed the flow of time?
It also seems that the transformation of the pyramid into a sphere might be
an exploration of skew polyhedra, which Gott wrote a paper on as well in
1967.

Gene writes articles for Physical Review C, which is the journal of Nuclear
Physics.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:

Even though Gene’s wife in the story is named Martha rather than Rosemary,
there is something about the idea of the Sis universe propagating through
the past of this one that leaves me to wonder if we are to infer that the
unnamed Sis, who he speaks to at the same time that he speaks to his wife
and for some reason knows that she herself will never marry, has always
been real, especially considering that her name is “Sis”. Has his creation
of the monopole created a sister that never existed before (especially as
our Gene Wolfe is an only child)? Is this why the story is called
“Procreation” – the seed of Generation creates a sister, rather than Gene
and Sis coming together to create a universe?

Do the waveform reflections of Sis constitute the entrance to Siseration?
Why is her name actually “Sis” if she was always real?

The most difficult interpretive task is questioning the microverse’s
relationship to our own universe. Are both Generation and Siseration
separate from our universe, the complementary positive and negative
monopoles? The ending of Sis’ account complicates this: [The other
universe] is gone now, so that when I stand before my mirror, I see only my
own face. Or perhaps that second universe was ours, and it is we who are
gone, leaving as our only trace these words upon a printed page.” I feel
that this is a bit more philosophical than the simple metafictional
explanation that Gene and Sis are creations of our Gene Wolfe, just words
on a page.

Once again, there is a mystical association with trees – in the reflection,
Sis sees a family living underground inside a giant tree, so that the tree
can live on the surface. When she sees the continents rising up in the
apocalyptic vision of her youth, they are “as high … as large trees”.

CONNECTION WITH OTHER WORKS:
The light-hearted hubris on display here is slightly more pronounced than
in “The Last Thrilling Wonder Story”, and the idea of artificial universes
within other universes seeded by a simple moment that serves as the first
cause that complicates cosmology beyond most rational attempts to
categorize it are of course Borgesian in its convolutions.

The female characters have names which imply "bitter" became an
increasingly common trend in Wolfe's fiction of the 1980s.

 In some ways the repeated cycles of the New Sun books plays with many of
the same themes, and the incorporation of religion, science, and myth are
hallmarks of Wolfe's preoccupations throughout his entire career, though
this story is exceptionally “hard” in its use of physics.


 Cramer, John. “The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum
Mechanics.” *Reviews
of Modern Physics* 58, 647–688, July (1986)

Gott, J Richard. “Creation of Open Universes from DeSitter Space.” *Nature*
295, 304-307, 1982.

Niemark, Jill. “J Richard Gott on Life, the Universe, and Everything.”
Science and Spirit Magazine, 2007.
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