Rirhath B

Rirhath B, showing the Khe'tek continent where the Crossings is located

(Also "Rirhath B vi") Sixth planet of eight in the Rirhath system; home planet of the Crossings Intercontinual Worldgating Facility and origin planet of the Rirhait species.*

In HW, Rirhath B is identified as a planet of epsilon Indi by Dairine's newly cloned computer, which gives the right distance to that star in lightyears. However, this identification seems in retrospect to be incorrect, as the space around Rirhath B, later observed by Kit and Nita as being full of short-term variable stars, does not match the space observable around ε Indi. The fluorescence of the planet's daytime atmosphere also does not match up with what might be expected in the neighborhood of a type K star slightly cooler than Earth's sun. Explanations for what is either an error in target identification or in the computer's interstellar gating routines are difficult to come by at this stage, but there is always the possibility that the cloning procedure that Dairine used on the computer was flawed, producing the equivalent of a crosslinked file or similar disk error. Also, the Manual software is explicitly stated in HW to be in a beta release, so it is also possible that the computer's atlas functions were impaired by some deeply buried bug in its ID routines. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Rirhath B's population is described in WAW as relatively small: on any given day, its population of transient aliens will far outnumber the world's actual residents. (HW, TBONWM et al.)

• Despite the nomenclature, this is not a secondary body or a planet of a binary star: the "B" refers to a Rirhait naming convention expressing a cultural referent difficult to translate into many languages of discourse.