Forty-eight hours on Halcyon Station

Most people treat Halcyon Station the way you treat a corridor: off the shuttle from Port Kestrel, a cup of something at the gate, onto the liner and away. That is a mistake. The great wheel over Calder is a small city with a long street, its own farms, a shipyard and the best window in the Reach, and two days is just about enough to do it properly.

Day one: the Promenade

The shuttle takes about six hours from Port Kestrel: a few minutes pressed into your seat at three times your weight, then weightless all the way to docking. You arrive at the hub, where you still float, and ride a spoke lift down towards the rim. Weight comes back gently on the way, and by the time the doors open on the Rim deck you have nearly all of it. The wheel is 2.4 km across and turns once every 70 seconds, slowly enough that you barely notice, unless you turn your head quickly in the lift.

Drop your bag and go straight to the Promenade, the long curved street that runs round the Rim deck. The odd thing about it, and the thing you will remember, is that the floor rises ahead of you in both directions, so that you always seem to be at the bottom of a valley that walks along with you. There are chandlers, a barber, tailors who alter suits, and a bakery that opens at five for the dock crews. A brisk walk takes you round the whole ring in under an hour. Walk on and you arrive where you began, which is the whole joke of the place.

Day one: window cafés and the gardens

Halcyon's window cafés are its living rooms: narrow places along the Promenade with a strip of window, where you can sit for an hour over one pot of tea and watch Calder below. Some have windows set in the floor, through which the planet swings past once every turn of the wheel; first-timers tend to prefer a table by the wall. The best seats face Calder's limb, the thin bright line where the air meets the dark. Go mid-morning, when the crews have gone back to work.

Walk on and you arrive where you began, which is the whole joke of the place.

Have lunch there too, because the hydroponic gardens close for an hour at noon. Go down in the early afternoon. They are on the lower deck, beneath the Promenade, and they grow most of the station's vegetables in long racks under violet light, which makes the leaves look nearly black and your hands look bruised. It is warm and damp and smells of wet soil, the only place on the station that does. Visitors keep to the central walk; the gardeners will tell you which racks are being picked and, if you ask nicely, let you try a pea pod.

Dinner is back on the Promenade, and then bed. Book a room on the outer ring, from about 260 marks a night: with nearly full weight people sleep better there than anywhere else on the station, and after a day of walking you will.

Day two: the shipyards and the departures gallery

Halcyon's shipyards build and repair most of the liners in the Reach, and the morning tour is the best value on the station. Bring identification and wear closed shoes; you will be turned away without either. You will see hull sections longer than a row of Promenade cafés, welders at work in the weightless bays at the hub, and a liner's ring being balanced, which is slower and more delicate than you would think. Our ships editor, Tomas Arkwright, spent nine years here inspecting hulls. He says the guides are good, and that the best questions are about the welds.

In the afternoon, go to the departures gallery and watch a liner leave. The gallery sits over the dock, with windows in its floor, and when the clamps let go the ship does not so much leave as fall away beneath your feet, dropping back and out of sight as the wheel turns on without it. The boards list every sailing. The gallery is busiest in a Tessaly window, when families come to wave.

Dusk at the Long Window

End at the Long Window, Halcyon's observation deck, reopened after its refit: a curved window 300 metres long, with a darkened deck and benches along its length. The dawn sessions are the ones to plan for: bookings open three days ahead, and the best dawns go within hours. Dusk, the hour when the station's orbit carries it into Calder's shadow, is easier to walk into and, to my mind, better. You watch the day side slide away and the limb thin to a line of blue, and then comes the night side, dark but for the towns. In the aurora season a band of green light hangs over the pole. If the timing is right, Selka rises at the end of the window, grey and sharp-edged.

Keep your voice down and your flash off: the deck has quiet hours, and the staff enforce them kindly but firmly. Then walk back along the Promenade to your room, and in the morning board your liner like someone who has actually been to Halcyon.