Divine Deception: The Will Traveller Chronicals by Robert James Page B

what
they’d believed all their lives, that I doubted if anyone actually
knew the whole truth.
    Already
disillusioned with her long-revered Supreme Family, Susan was still
frequently shocked at what Zoran had to tell me about this
inexorably devolving and often thoroughly disgusting family of
mine. It had started out as a way of preventing the omni powerful
junior members of the Supreme Family from going overboard on their
own ‘Godliness’, in effect, a strict code of obedience to the
Supreme One. But it had degenerated into the utterly immoral old
man acquiring sexual control of his family. Incest was now the
norm, along with an excessive use of a wide variety of ‘mind
expanding’ drugs. That explained the ever calm Lord Peter. Zoran
was saddened to hear from Susan that, out in Centropolis and ‘most
likely in the rest of the New World’, the original concept of
government by meritocracy had slid back into a world of nepotism
and bureaucratic fiefdoms.
    Zoran had served
at Admin, then retired ‘Back to Red House’.
    “I specifically
requested to be returned to Red House, from out here, just after
you left Lord Robert” Zoran had an odd expression on his face.
Obviously I was supposed to ask
    “The prediction?
You knew all about it?”.
    “I have known
since you were a very naughty young man Sire” The old man’s voice
confirmed what I’d figured out. He had come back to ‘wait on and
guide’ me in the performance of my mission.
    “May I be allowed
to know Robert?” Only Susan had been able to accommodate my request
to be called just that, by everyone else. I nodded and Zoran told
her all about the mysterious appearing and disappearing old woman
and her predictions.
    “As to exactly how
I’m supposed to accomplish this mission” I cut in, when he had
finished “Well, I haven’t figured that part out yet” I told her,
then turned to ask Zoran how many of these T.T.V’s the Supreme
Family had all told. The old man thought a moment.
    “Just twelve full
combat units, including these two” Zoran estimated “And another six
or so older models, used only for personnel and goods” The old man
added. Although the total number of combat ready troops numbered
just three hundred, including the eighty T.T.V. crew members, the
location and the defence technology of the Supreme House, made it
totally invincible to any currently existing force outside of
it.
    Not that there was
very much force outside the Supreme House. The dozen or so city
states that made up the New World had conventionally armed foot and
air cycle police. Between them, they had six conventional T.T.V’s,
which were unarmed, along with a relatively static defence
military, whose main function was to effectively created a thin,
but quite impenetrable defence perimeter, around each of the city
states’ borders. Much as they might want to, the people who lived
in this world’s ‘uninhabited wilds’, with nothing but hand made
tools and weapons, could not even make their existence known to the
totally insulated city state dwellers. Zoran had been told about
them by my equally wayward siblings and I, on our return from our
‘hunter gatherers trips’.
    “All these folks
do is hunt, copulate and fight off animals” We had told him. When
they weren’t defending their very existence from my Brothers and I
that is. Willow Vale wasn’t quite the way it was presented,
according to Zoran, who, after eight years there, had reached the
‘leadership committee’ who decided on whether to “Play tennis,
bridge, bowls or some other intrepid activity” Zoran snickered,
with a note of distaste “You have no idea how nasty people can get,
when they get old Sire” Zoran told me. We were all soon to find out
how true that was for ourselves. The Supreme One was supremely old,
and supremely nasty! The odd thing was, Zoran’s Son and Daughter
lived there now, their kids now worked in house service, but not in
mine.
    Our twenty eight
sleeping Red