“We can do this. Let’s spin about our main axis, dive straight down through the north pole.”

Is than an order?

“You bet. I did follow all those simulations, lectures, endless speculations. Now we get to use them.”

We are turning. Hold on.

Rachel was at the ship axis anyway, so she felt nothing as the room started to spin. Fraq adjusted his securing belts, while helping the dynamics program adjust. Her fore screen showed them shooting on, into the wormring. The ship knocked and strummed as they skated by whorls that slammed into their nose. Rattles, pops. Rachel wished she had been able to bring Claire.

“Y’know, I kinda hoped I’d have more time to talk to the theory guys about this.”

You said you were in the shower a long time.

“Uh, yeah.”

Alone?

“You’re getting into an area beyond your competence. Y’know, not having a body and all.”

Oh, my.

This was in a phony, high-pitched English voice, like a parody of Jane Austen. Erma kept getting smarter, but not more charming. “Look, skip the gossip! Why’s this thing look like a rotating donut?”

Wormholes are not tubes, my database says quite clearly. They present in our space as solid objects. One passes through them by just merging with them. It is not like falling down a pipe.

“This one’s spinning faster now.”

Apparently. The alterations the scientists carried out to expand it radially seem to have added angular momentum.

A pause, then—

I must adjust our trajectory for this new spin. I will have to delay any movement, so we have time to consider our next, and quite possibly fatal, movements. I need to carry out a coordinate transform—

“Just do it. Wormholes connect parts of spacetime, so—hey, it connects both parts of space and… uh… parts of time?”

Not for the first time, Rachel regretted her spotty physics education. Librarians usually did little manual labor, and her piloting education had only partly made up for that. Realistically, she was just about one grade above the ore haulers. She glanced at Fraq and saw his shadowy nod, conveying skeptical assent with a sharp birdy-call. She had learned a lot of Ythri sing-meaning now. It was one of their work-arounds to be sure Erma and people in general didn’t quite know what was going on between them.

Which was fun, too, a delightful interspecies game.

I do know from ancillary reading that the philosopher Gödel solved the general field equations, in their classical limit, for a rotating universe. He found that time could form loops around the entire universe. Apparently he did this to illustrate a point about time being eternal. In some sense, Gödel believed this. So he found an exact solution to show to his friend Einstein.

“Centuries back, sure. So what?”

But! Just because one has a formal solution to a set of differential equations does not mean there is any physical validity to the resulting spacetime. Until, of course, we found this wormhole, which broke open the issue. Einstein and Gödel were, as you would put it, buddies. Physics-math buddies.