Andrew knew he was probably a Tallie as well, amongst other things. His paternal grandmother had been one of the very few full-on engineered people to escape North America. Perhaps the only one. She had been in the local town’s hospital when multiple nuclear missiles had hit the main genetic engineering site. Although severely burned, she had somehow survived radiation poisoning and slowly made her way south over the course of the next decade until she reached a part of Central America that had not been targeted.

Unfortunately, there was a lot of anti-engineered prejudice in the area, so when a ship called planning to sail to southern Africa, she went for the ride. Southern Africa was not as badly hit as the northern hemisphere. All the big cities were glowing ruins, but there hadn’t been the saturation bombing that had occurred in most of the northern hemisphere countries. On the other hand, most whites had been in the cities, so she felt out of place and was treated like a second-class person because of her skin color.

A couple of years there, and when a rickety boat came through heading for India, she went with it. She arrived just in time for a war to break out between two rival successor states in the country’s southern half. As was the case elsewhere, most of the major cities had been bombed here as well as many of the military sites. There was also serious devastation along the border with Pakistan and, to a lesser extent, the border with China. The local warlord commandeered the ship she had traveled on to help transport a part of his army to land in the rear of his enemies. Which had left his grandmother high and dry in the port she had arrived in rather than where she had been headed.

Sixth months later, after the warlord’s overly ambitious campaign plan had led to his separated forces being defeated in detail, the victorious enemy army had swept into the city. His grandmother had become friendly with a young fellow at one of the few foreign-embassies still extant, the Ostrayan one, and found refuge with the young office worker. When he was transferred back to Ostraya, they had a quick marriage ceremony, and as his wife, she was allowed to come home with him.

Gilong was the largest city not to be bombed and had become the capital of Ostraya in the years following the war. It had taken ten years and a marauding mass of invaders from the islands to the north before both Kimberley and Pilbra had re-joined the Commonwealth. Through careful investments and judicious use of carefully made underworld contacts, she had periodically appeared to die, each time leaving her estate to a distant relative who was clearly several decades younger than her. Andrew didn’t know how many times she had managed this trick, but it had to have been several. She had finally started to age after his father’s birth, who was only the third child she had carried to term. Most of her somewhat frequent pregnancies ended in a miscarriage.