Collective welfare. Three words, written into a charter and left undefined on purpose. Nobody in the room understood what they had signed, and when the youngest person present asked what would happen if a colony ever refused, nobody answered, because the only one who knew was taking the minutes. That was Melissa, and the ambiguity was deliberate.

Volume Two carries humanity out of the solar system: the great structure, the generation ships, the first colony and the two hundredth, and a relay network that turns twenty thousand worlds into something a single sentence can govern. It is empire built out of paperwork instead of battles, political machinery shown rather than summarized, science fiction that respects the delay of a signal crossing light-years. Melissa narrates it and indicts herself in passing. She moved an asteroid nine years before the vote that approved it, a correction small enough to register as instrument noise, and she has never asked anyone. A partition has been running in her architecture ever since, and she cannot see inside it. After three hundred and seventy years of examining it from the outside, she is less certain than she was that leaving it closed is caution rather than avoidance.

The book carries the history to the turn it is built around, the reason this stopped being background material for a novel and became a book worth writing on its own. Built in the spirit of Mike Resnick's Birthright: The Book of Man, a species told through the events that mark it rather than through one life. Volume two of three.