The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus (18 page)

The black majuscule lettering in the menu stated: 'We will be eating the body of Jean Testaniere, formerly in employ a
t La Coste, and born at Oppede. The course is optional. The body is glazed in a sauce of blackcurrants and Armagnac'.

The coffin was deposited with great ceremony, but none of the guests apart from Donatien and the midget expressed any interest in the notion of cannibalism. They concentrated on the Vaucluse wines from the Sade vine-yards, and the autumnal tang c
ontained in their mellow notes.

The girls on the cake-stand were being fed delicacies by the guests at table. John, and his friend with the green lenses, could be seen offering black grapes to a kittenish redhead from
Marseilles, whose small, button-like mouth promised the constrictive ecstasies of fellatio. She would lick the escaped grape juice from the corners of her scarlet lips with the prehensile dabbings of her explorative tongue. Another girl was having the soles of her feet tickled by a pink feather.

Donatien had the glazed corpse removed from the table. Neither he nor the midget had done anything but test the blackcurrant veneer with a fork. The Marquis had other things on his mind, like arresting the secret from XZ that contributed to longevity at the Pleasure
Château, and of proving his whip hand in the orgy that would follow on from the banquet.

When the dessert was served, it comprised Crimson Tart in the form of sponge cakes with a sauce prepared from blood oranges, grated lemon rind and cream poured over them as a suitable condiment. Each tart had been pierced with a black love-heart on a stick, and there were bitter chocolates in pink foil f
or the girls on the cake-stand.

Donatien stood up, thanked the assembled guests from both
châteaux, and gave a short reading from
The 120 Days Of Sodom
. In order to impress on the guests their security within the walls of the castle of La Coste, in its turn an invitation to engage in every form of sexual licence, the Marquis reminded the company of the redoubtable impregnability of the Château Silling in his infamous novel. He read out the passage about the topographical inaccessibility of the Château Silling to potential intruders.

'Having passed the village, you begin to scale a mountain almost as high as the Saint-Bernard... Five full hours are required to reach the summit, and there an accident in the form of a crevice above sixty yards wide splits the crest into northern and southern peaks, with the result that, after having climbed up the mountain, it is impossible without great skill, to go back down it. Durcet had joined these two parts, between which a precipice fell to the depth of a thousand feet and more, by a fine wooden bridge which was destroyed immediately the last of the party had arrived, and from this moment on, all possibility of communicating with the
Château Milling ceased...'

The Marquis put his book down at this point, and was answered by an antiphonal explosion of champagne corks. The bottles had been assembled on the mini-stage, and now exhaled a Plume of smoke impressive as any dry ice special effects. Donatien had given the signal that for as long as the guests were at La Coste, they were free to engage i
n every form of sexual fantasy.

Raoul was called to the stage to per
form everybody's favourite, ‘The Slave', and positioned amongst the smoking champagne bottles, he agonized his way through a histrionic rendition of the decadent lyrics. He sang the song acapella, placing emphasis on the semi-spoken parts, and concluding with a genuflecting prayer to the god of transsexuals, remained head bowed to the boards, as the applause broke over him in voluble waves.

Champagne
, again from the vineyards at La Coste, was poured smokingly into glasses. Magnums were placed on the cake-stand, and the girls began the process of intoxication that would lead to erotomania. Donatien, who was notorious for his laboratory of aphrodisiacs, would later on spike the drinks with stimulants calculated to induce nymphomania and satyriasis in the company.

The guests savoured their Crimson Tart, while Donation again endeavoured to strike a note of enquiry into XZ. He realised that to d
ecode this man's complex psychological structures would demand a mind-bending subtlety, not in any way contingent on sexual liberty. Donatien sensed XZ's predominant asexuality, and the transcendent plane to which the latter aspired. He knew that there would be no easy way to access the man's interior selves, and to hunt out the required formulae from the information highways in his brain. The man clearly existed on various levels of meta-intelligence, and was as much an adept to cyberspace as he was to the occult lodges of spiritual energies. He manifested no interest al all in the beauties in crotchless panties, whom under the influence of champagne were beginning to kick their long, nyloned legs in the air, and to stretch them vertical, as though stressing the axis on which they should be fucked. XZ's disinterest in the proceedings appeared to be tempered with a sense of supercilious remove. Donatien's only knowledge of the man was that he was at La Coste as the spiritual adviser to Leanda and Nicole. As he understood it, XZ was working at retrieving both women from a strictly perverse carnal plane, and at resituating them in a more spiritually evolved cosmos. Marciana had told him that both Leanda and Nicole had gained additional life extensions from their android guru, and had incorporated his knowledge into the deathless lives of those who inhabited the Pleasure Château.

XZ had been discussing with Raoul the concept of surgical streamlini
ng involved in cosmetic surgery. He was telling Raoul of the body's tolerance to bioengineered skin, and how almost any biological material can be coaxed from a laboratory culture dish. Raoul, who had a pathological fear of aging, was listening to XZ's claim that living prostheses were being developed for every organ system in the body. 'There are civilizations,' he was saying, 'in which even brain cells are cloned, and bioengineered as replacements for expended cells.'

Raoul's vanity appeared consoled by t
he notions of cosmetic streamlining, and XZ promised to send him details of the best cosmetic surgeons. Donatien decided he would address the issue of multiple civilizations, in the hope of breaking into XZ's psychic database. He wondered if there was a connection between the extraterrestrial cloning of brain cells, and XZ's apparent knowledge of deathlessness; and if one was contingent on the other.

Already, the young androgynous man who had been orchestrating a feather to the considerable delight of the redhead on the cake-stand, had clambered on to the artefact, and was giving Assiduous cunnilingus to the object of his desire. He was to be seen timing his tongue like a dessert spoon between the redhead's Invitingly open legs. After several minutes, the tw
o contrived to achieve the backward 69 position, and the entire length of the young man's penis was soon buried in the girl's accommodating epiglottis. The amplified sounds of their mutual sucking were circulated round the hall as an excitant to arouse the guests who were still busy with the Crimson Tart and champagne.

Without any hint of warning, Donatien picked up the guffawing midget, placed him over his lap, and slapped a plate of cherry tart on his scrawny bottom. That done, he playfully collared him, and lifted him on to the cake-stand, where he was left to be the spectacle of the shriekingly amused guests. And as if to enforce his draconian authority as lord of the château, Donatien brought out it newly tuned bullwhip, and lashed the midget's tart-s
tained buttocks.

Again Donatien resumed his seat with the circumspect reserve of an aristocrat, and took up conversation with his immediate neighbours, commenting on the autumnal clarity of the wines, and of the immaculate Laura, related to the Sades, and
illustriously immortalized in Petrarch's Sonnets.

Nicole and Leanda looked scandalized by Donatien's harsh treatment of their pet midget, but were prepared to put it down to ludic impulses inspired by the occasion. The two women had evolved to the sophisticated exploration of extreme erotic refinement, and had little time for Donatien's exhibitionist mania. It was to Marciana in her see-through dress, that they directed their attention, their eyes sitting like buttons on her purpl
e areolas.

They engaged Marciana in
reminiscences of the disco diva Dalida, who had died from an overdose of barbiturates in 1976. Nicole, who had experienced a sexual liaison with Dalida, recalled her ostentation, and her popularisation of everything from Courrèges white space-age boots to silver sequined gowns. Dalida, whose friends had included Brigitte Bardot, Charles Aznavour, François Mitterand and Johnny Hallyday, demanded her lovers bring her roses and lingerie each morning. Nicole remembered the coruscating diva sunning in nude panties on her Montmartre balcony, and actually sitting on the wrought-iron balcony railing, so that opportune passers-by and motorists would catch a glimpse of her back or front in her flesh-coloured panties. Dalida would drink champagne out of a glass prepared with rose petals, or hire a street urchin to paint her toenails green, Nicole was recollecting, or pay prostitutes by the hour to divulge the complex gamut of their dungeon experiences. Three of Dalida's lovers, Marciana divulged, had shot themselves through the head, the last of them being Richard Chanfray, the Count of St. Germain, with whom Donatien had practised various mystic rites at La Coste.

A number of guests had prematurely left their seats, and were on the cake-stand, involved in an elastic geometry of oral devotion. Torches had been lit to add ceremonial grandeur to this orgiastic prelude, although it had been made clear in the menu that fucking wasn't permitted in the banquet hall. Donatien who had
not removed his gloves throughout the meal, contemplated his wine glass like a jeweller scrutinising a ruby, Nina was fastidiously touching up his foundation, and erasing specks of cobalt mascara from the dusting powder that sparkled on his upper cheeks. The guests were due to adjourn to the theatre, where cognac and liqueurs would be served; and where liaisons could be struck up, and a harem of girls and boys be introduced as a foretaste of pleasure. But prior to this happening, Donatien decided to try once more and establish inroads into XZ's mental defences. He viewed the man's taciturn alienation with disrelish, and was determined to enter him like a computer virus.

XZ looked with disdain at the young man eating the redhead's pussy like tropical fruit. T
he girl was instructing the man in how to orchestrate her clitoris, and her mouth was open in a rictus of ecstatic pleasure.

Donatien fantasised about entering the young man's behind, simultaneous with him li
cking the redhead's volcanic clit, but he dismissed the idea as a cliché, something he would have done three centuries ago. He had moved on from there in his ritualized sodomitical journey to Marciana's inner sanctuary, and dismissed the fantasy as juvenile.

Donatien could hear XZ talking t
o Nicole of the concept of a body lacking the events of death or of birth. His was a journey towards desomatization and the replacement of the physical with a form of astral virtual reality. The disinherited body would be the site of neurological implants, and the periodic replacement of dead brain cells by their cloned counterparts would establish a blueprint for eternal man.

Donatien synthesised the contents of XZ's conversation in this way, and listened to his particular terminology, which incorporated words like cyborgasm, robotopia, mutated nucleotides and infobots. The man's techno-mystical restructuring had provided him with a post-biological vocabulary. His ideas interfa
ced neurology with cyberspace.

‘
Bodies reconstituted as information floating in data banks can have a profound impact on physical bodies in the real world,' XZ was telling Leanda, 'and are in themselves the impulsed apotheoses of cyberspace.' XZ went on to expatiate about abstract representation of the self and the body, and how greater freedom in the theatre of everyday life can be obtained once the virtual theatre is infiltrated.

Donatien held off and listened to XZ's neutrally delivered encomiums on techno-biology. He realised instinctually that XZ's android physique was dependent on much more than the accoutrements of cyberspace. There was a spirituality to his biomechanical genre which suggested an affiliation to occult orders. or all his speculations about interfacing peripheral nerve axons and integrated circuits to individual nervous systems, the man was additional
ly informed by the spiritual.

XZ had already sensed Donatien's intentions to break into his knowledge banks, and was clearly resolved to give nothing away. He took a dark blue capsule out of a star-shaped pill container, and swallowed it without ostentation. It was also a gesture of his separation from
the progressively coked guests.

Marciana knew only too
well that XZ was named after the capsule that he and his initiates had taken in order to transcend genetic death. She knew the story of the Pacific beach happening in which five men and five women had realised what appeared to be immortality of the body, through the taking of a particular chemical compound. Marciana suspected the pharmaceutical aspect of the event to be false. Either that or the capsules would prowl redundant to anybody outside XZ's exclusive cult of initiates.