The capital's permanent sky landmark: a vast rigid buoyant port platform floating high over the city, moored by cables and a slender monorail-and-elevator spine, timber-and-ceramic deck, delta craft and dragons arriving. It is physically honest, a moored aerostat, not a miracle: the world pays for its wonders and this one is paid in engineering. Visible in the background of every capital view, it completes the skyline saying: the sphere on the ground, the port in the sky. Deciding below, arriving above.
The port is where the belt's movement becomes visible in one place: craft dock at the ring's cells, cargo moves on the two decks, visiting pods and crews tie up beside the route-dragons roosting between flights. Everything that arrives announces itself, docks, and works alongside what was already there. The city below can look up at any hour and see its own logistics as weather.
The trellis-tenders ride the elevator spine to the Starport, and from the Starport outward to the works at solar orbit. Tending is mostly patience punctuated by exactness, and the tenders' unofficial motto translates roughly as: the sun does not hurry and neither do we. A tender's homecoming, down the spine with the valley opening below, is one of the belt's stock images of return, and half the songs pretending to be about something else are about it.
