The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus (21 page)

The sexual proceedings were t
emporarily interrupted by the arrival of drinks and chocolates said to incite aphromania. There was also a dish of Crème Fouettée à la Rose, a whipped cream delicacy with an infusion of essence of roses. Strawberries shaped like buttocks had been placed on top of the cream, and the exhausted orgiasts were glad to disengage from their complex geometries, and stop for food. There were cakes studded with miniature choux-buns and pistachios, and filled with macaroons and strawberries.

Donatien delighted in these
delicacies, and knew only too well the potency of the aphrodisiacs prepared by him at La Coste. It was the injudicious use of aphrodisiacs on Easter Sunday, April 3, 1768, that had got him into so much trouble with Rose Keller, who he had picked up in the Place de Victoires. He let his mind regress three centuries, and isolated the image of himself in a grey frock coat with a muff of lynx fur. He had been standing with his back to the grillwork at the base of the statue of Louis XIV, when he had seen Rose Keller leave mass at the church of the Petits-Pères, and so it had developed. He had, he remembered, taken her to a small house in rue de Lardenay, where two other prostitutes were waiting, and there got into trouble through the liberal use of aphrodisiacs on a woman who resisted his sexual advances. It was all part of a biography he had transcended, but the incident had made considerable inroads into his life, and had contributed to his long years of incarceration for sexual offences. He would never forget Rose and her aggrieved German face, and her testimony outlawing him as an unnatural.

The centuries had developed with him, Donatien reflected, and so many street drugs had come to be used as sexual stimulants, that the use of aphrodisiacal compounds were no longer considered exceptional. But his were unnaturally potent, and as he savoured the first of the pastilles, so he was aware that within thirty minutes his already volatile penis would be rigid
against his stomach-button. He wanted to watch how the orgiasts would be affected before he withdrew with Marciana into a sumptuously prepared bedroom.

Most of the participants were bus
y enjoying the Crème Fouettée à la Rose, and Donatien delighted in the knowledge that they would be little suspecting the sexual irritation that would occur in their genitalia in the coming hours. Donatien enjoyed the idea that the redhead would become a tempestuous nymphomaniac, greedy for every penis that would enter her three orifices. He would observe the considerable fucking as a spectator, while the itch mounted in his cock like lava rising to erupt from a mountain. Donatien liked to savour the growing suspense and irascibility of his semen. He liked his libido to be at the point of detonation before he began the long journey to ejaculation. And even on the point of release he would repress orgasm, and coax the concluding force two or three times to a near head before finally coming. Part of the thrill, he reflected, was in imagining release, so that when the escalating pressure finally exploded, it was because it could no longer be contained.

Wines and champagne were bei
ng served, and so too were the best fruits glazed with alcohols. The whole sensual spectrum of the libertine was being observed, and Donatien was careful to see that every detail of the aesthetic was explored. There were oils, perfumes, and emollients, and on one side of the theatre a rail on which a great variety of fetish costumes were available to the participants.

The midget was sitting on
an oriental woman's lap, having his tufty hair stroked. The monkey played at his feet, and would occasionally slap the bottom of a girl within easy reach. Donatien and Marciana were joined in a conspiratorial overview of the re-uptake of the orgy, as a number of guests reassembled in a manner that was like ivy climbing one of the castle's walls. They spread over each other in arrow formation, clinging to parts of the body with the tenacious climbing grip of dark liana.

Donatien could sense that th
e stimulants were taking effect, for the eagerness with which the couples took up with each other again was immediate and devoid of temerity. Donatien noticed that XZ had decided to leave, and he cut a lonely figure in his silver boots as Leanda and Nicole walked with him to the exit. His hair was tied back, and to Donatien he resembled a post-biological being, a sort of android who had brought the knowledge of extra terrestrial worlds with him to this planet. Donatien was preparing his mind for the chance to crack the man's secrets the following day, while preserving the formula that allowed him and his sister to enjoy a longevity that had endured through the centuries.

Leanda and Nicole had disappeared with XZ into the recesses of the
château's corridors, and Marciana felt anxious that she should be denied the women's favours. Marciana had been inwardly preparing the erotic configurations she would enjoy with the two women. In her mind she knew their lovemaking would be exhaustively beautiful, and that in terms of oral expertise would enjoy a prerogative that no man could ever emulate. Their combined tongues would reach places that she suspected men never knew existed. All the little millimetres that formed the circumference of the clitoris were to Marciana the most exquisitely sensitive of places, and were part of an erogenous dynamic that men usually neglected. It was a part of the body that she liked to make up with lipstick, thereby eroticizing the clitoris as a woman's central point of focus. Marciana looked forward to the careful application of red or black or mauve or shocking pink lipstick points to Nicole's clitoris, and to propping Leanda up on all fours prior to writing obscenities on her buttocks with the same lipstick.

Massive, anatomically incongruous fuckings were beginning to take place, and two men had contrived together to enter a woman from behind, and had both
been penetrated themselves by another two men from the harem. The quintuple effort of the orgiasts was volcanic, and they moved around the floor like a weird sea creature, a mollusc on ten legs that was straining to find an axis, and which fucked itself into awkward motion.

To Donatien the exhibit looked like something es
caped from the sea-bed of Lautréamont's
Maldoror
, and he allowed the orgiasts time to establish a pleasurable rhythm before cutting at them with a whip. He administered only one searing cut, and the noise describing the whip's trajectory was like that of a stick jumping out of a fire.

Donatien sto
od back and reviewed his work, and the two men who had taken the ferocity of the blow were marked with lateral stripes. It was a cut with which Donatien was pleased, and he went forward and examined the wound and ordered a photograph to be taken of it, and had Nina video the weird conglomeration of bodies, all irritated to the maximum degree by potent aphrodisiacs. Donatien realised that even if he should lay Into them with multiple strokes, they would maintain their erotic positions, so urgent were their needs to continue fucking.

The divine Marquis felt a gold autumnal halo surrounding his whip
hand. Whenever he was most alive to himself, this aura appeared. He knew it as a sign that he was on the road to mystic vision. He was certain too that his marriage to Marciana would be another stage on the road to apocalypse.

Elsewhere in the theatre, groups or couples were singularly devoted to establishing geometries of sexual pleasure. Two of the oriental women were sitting facing each other, legs arched, and were tickling themselves to orgasm with the use of long feathers. Most of the girls in crotchless panties, who had been liberally revealing themselves on the cake-stand
, had been taken away to the bedrooms. Donatien imagined them being bounced hard on the creaky springs of the château's beds, beds he had purchased from brothels, and which had seen endless service from hungry sailors in Marseilles. He himself had pinned redheads in glassine stockings to the bordello beds which had been extravagantly refurbished for use at La Coste. But he had retained the original mattresses with their impacted springs, so that as a voyeur he could tune his ear to the commentary of lovemaking as it happened in the castle's bedrooms.

At a certain point he decided
he had seen enough, and that it was time for him to impose on Marciana in the grandest of the château's bedrooms. At a sign from Donatien, Nina brought him a chalice containing the transparent panties that Marciana had been wearing in the theatre. He kissed the item in reverence of his sister, and ran his ring-finger over the shivering fabric. He trembled on contact with the material, and felt his erection type out the secret planetary code that brought him and his sister together. And having offered respect to the most intimate of Marciana's items of clothing, Donatien took up a torch and pointed it to the vaulted ceiling. He made a request to Raoul that he should perform the song 'Incestuous Love' on the theatre's mini-stage, so as to additionally ceremonialize the rites in which he would lead his sister out of the theatre and through the corridors lit by cove lights to a scarlet bedroom.

Raoul performed
an impromptu acapella version of Barbara's elegiac song in which a parent of forty celebrates the physical love he had shared with a child of twenty. The autumnal feel to the lyrics, and the imagined château in which the song is set, all contributed to the pervading atmospherics at a La Coste furnished for ritual orgy.

Marciana now came to her brother's side, having been especially prepared by Nina, and linked her arm to his, and adopted the conspiratorial sense of
hauteur
that distinguished the Sade family. As Raoul completed the song, so brother and sister left the room to the accompaniment of dark red roses being strewn in their path. Donatien stooped to pick up a rose and place it in his sister’s hair. Marciana was wearing eight-inch heels so as to accentuate the mould of her bottom as she walked the length of the corridors to the bedroom. Nina was to follow with a camcorder, so that Donatien could re-live the scene on endless repeat. The natural lift and compact curvature to Marciana's bottom, and its elevation on stupendously high heels was of mono-maniacal interest to Donatien. He had resolved never again to miss the chance of augmenting footage of his sister's bottom. The Marquis reflected on how his sister's anus was full of stars, and how he literally fucked the heavens in their sexual discourse. He conceived it that the planets were shot into their respective orbits in Marciana, each time he came. His relationship with his sister had involved the seeding of a new heaven.

The couple walked the length of corridors lined with stuffed animals, and scented with
Eau de Patou
. They were aimed for a bedroom wallpapered with thousands of pairs of Marciana's panties. Donatien had all the time in the world. He had transcended biological decay, and was determined if necessary to exchange his body for a virtual one, should he in time be subject to cellular wear and tear. He would raid XZ's mental database, and extract from the latter's cyberlibrary the information he required to establish a virtual host.

The doors were opened for the couple, be
fore the attendants were free to enter the orgy that had dispersed throughout the château. They were allowed to hear nothing and to know nothing of the sexual rites conducted between brother and siste
r
be
h
ind sealed doors at La Coste.

*

Part V

Cyberlibrary

Donatien had planned his meeting with XZ for noon. He had deliberately chosen the library for their agreed rendezvous, as the walls were insulated by the bo
oks he had collected over the centuries. Beginning with works of philosophy and mysticism, Donatien had graduated over the years into a bibliophile, and his collection included poetry, fiction, and the new physics, as well as books on astrophysics and pharmaceuticals.

It was in the l
ibrary he wrote and surfed the internet for all he accumulating data on cryonics. The furnishings were all in mauve velvet, while the ceiling was painted cobalt as an aid to study and reflection. Donatien kept his black books there, the journals in which he wrote his sexual confessions, and which had accumulated over the centuries to a vast compendium of pathological admissions, all of them leather bound and monogrammed with the Sade crest.
The 120 Days Of Sodom
formed only a small section of a work in continuous progress.

Donatien closed the door of th
e library and went over to his favourite velvet armchair. He was early for the appointment with XZ, and let his thoughts luxuriate in the idea of his marriage to Marciana on the following day. It would also serve as a marriage of the two châteaux, and excluding the suspect XZ, for whom Donatien felt nothing but disgust, he welcomed the prospect of closer relations between the two sealed castles. He assumed from infonauts on the internet that other deathless colonies existed on earth, although from much of the data on screen, these appeared to be pockets established by extraterrestrial invasion. Donatien knew that walk-ins were eluding detection, and that a progressive android colonization was taking place in parts of Asia, and on the west coast of America.

The Marquis knew that in time he would have to defend his knowledge of DNA and c
ryonics against the progressive extraterrestrialisation of Earth. He suspected that XZ was al infiltrator into both châteaux, and that being in possession of alien intelligence, he was searching for post-biological knowledge in order to assist his cult in establishing supreme rule on earth. Donatien sensed that the man's aspirations were global, and that his impulse-translation of extraterrestrial frequencies gave him an intelligence that could bust the chemical randomness of the human. Space was XZ's modem, and Donatien, who belonged to a gothic laboratory intent on inhabiting a present rather than absent body, was concerned that libido should remain an authoritarian part of his species.

XZ entered the library with characteristic cool. To Donatien he resembled a west coast hippie, with his long hair tied back in a pony-tail, and his tight jeans capped by silver knee boots. Donatien knew that XZ had claimed that the destruction of the planet was programmed for 3,083, and that survivors of the catastrophe would be those who had learnt to migrate across the archetypal galaxies of inner space. Donatien felt uncomfortable that XZ should be able to define an exact time for apocalypse, particularly as the supposition was unassailable due to its exi
sting in a hypothetical future.

XZ sat down and crossed his legs, placing one silver boot over the other with meticulous poise. He requested a glass of mineral water, before taking out a dark blue capsule, and unloading the contents of the gelatin shell in water. To Donatien this seemed like a direct act of provocation, but he let the incident go. He was determined to follow no false trail, and had a shadow of suspicion that the capsules were produced for effect, and carried no real significance in terms of
affecting biological longevity.

'It's not a matter of challenge,' said XZ disarmingly, suddenly fixing his lenses on Donatien, 'it
's more a question of knowing.'

Donatien let the cryptic remark hang haloed in suspense, and realised that territorial prerogative was of no advantage in his relations with a humanoid whose territory was inner space. It was as though XZ had internalised the heavens, and that for Donatien to reach the elusive pinpoint of his personality, he would have to embark on an interplanetary mission.

'We're here,' Donatien proposed 'because we both contain secrets of life-extension. I have little doubt that you are no more willing to part with your formula, than I am with mine. If you have acquired your knowledge through psychic endeavour, then mine is the result of a libidinous humanitarian who has learnt from suffering.'

XZ remained respectfully taciturn, and appeared wholly reoccupied with his own route to the interior. 'There are only two methods of survival that interest me and
my cult,' said XZ, 'and one of these is the application of certain meditation techniques to the chakras, and the other is the preparation in time to abandon the body, and to live as an inhabitant of inner space through a virtual body.'

'And pleasure?' questioned the Marquis.
'How will we account for that?'

'Pleasure's conditioned by the quality of lucent inner light,'
said XZ. 'The pleasures of out-of-the-body sex are greatly superior to those experienced by physical sex. Astral orgasm is a point of high spiritual attainment. Our cult have developed a sexual vocabulary activated by neural implants which enhance the vibrational frequency of the chakras. Genitals are obsolete. The inner civilizations have outgrown the need for external genitalia.'

'I still maintain a trust in the infinitely reparable body,' said Donatien, feeling his somatic premises threatened by XZ's extrabiological theories. 'We at La Coste have no reason to disinherit the body,' said Donatien.
'Our family is a nuclear libido; it depends on sexual energies for its existence.'

XZ looked away. He appeared neither bored nor disinterested, but simply centred in
his own space. Donatien noted that XZ had a guru's coolness, and the sort of non-committal emotions that characterize pilots. He felt more and more certain that XZ was a planetary infiltrator.

'I would place more trust in a tele-existence,' said XZ. 'Why do you assume that physiology should occupy a purely local space? Post-human tele-operators would reach across solar systems, and so defy the concept of being localised by the body. Our cult is about light biology, and the expedients
of travel through inner space.'

Donatien saw that he would never extract the motivating dynamic behind XZ's post-human theories. The man's intelligence and his apparent defection from physicality made it difficult for Donatien to confront him on any sympathetically shared plane. Donatien kept imagining that behind XZ's lenses was an implant video display monitor, on which were shown ev
ents happening on another star.

‘B
ut we can't dispense with biology and remain human,' Donatien asserted, in an attempt to have XZ deliver an identity. ‘To my knowledge the immune system is going to wreak havoc on any foreign object you put into the body. Implants will surely be rejected in the process of mutating. And if you suppress the immune system in allowing for the implants, then isn't the body immediately open to viruses and bacteria? The likelihood of infections is going to be astronomical.'

XZ appeared mildly amused at Donatien's pragmatic trust in the body. He seemed to have assessed Donatien's ideas as belonging to another universe, but expressed no display of disdain or scepticism. He looked towards one of the library's high shelves, then moved his eyes back to Donatien, and said, 'you're still constrained by the physical. The experience of my small cult, or rather what happened to us on an isolated Pacific beach, was a transcendence of death without any physical effort. The energies that affected this transcendental state also worked to assist the body in overcoming its biological clock. More than that I can't disclose, and perhaps there are no language equivalent
s for this sort of experience.'

Donatien was impressed by the gentle tone in which XZ attempted to give an approximate account of his change-over, although he offered no clues as to how this post-evolutionary state was attained. Whatever had happened, he could see, was clearly so much a part of the man that it could never be separated off into language. It
remained composite within him.

'I can follow you up to a point,' said Donatien,
‘but of course I can't enter into the quality of your experience. Mysticism is a subjective discipline. What you pursue as a cult is individual to your members.'

‘B
ut it's also universal,' responded XZ. 'While I'm forbidden to state the exact nature of the experience that transformed both me and my eleven colleagues, we are confident that mankind is evolving towards a similar enlightenment. My work is to help sensitize global vibrations, so that the species as a whole arrive at the place at which I and my cult find ourselves. We can all achieve it — the migration towards hyperspace.'

Donatien realised that he had run into an impasse. To break XZ down would involve enumerating on his own cryonic formulae, by way of setting up a challenge, but he was unw
illing to risk the proposition.

'Have you made the Pleasure Château
your head-quarters?' he asked.

'It's a necessary modem for the present,' said XZ, 'for there
are the beginnings of an alert to the new species. Or at least a sympathy that will accommodate its evolution.'

'And what are your interests in my château?' asked Donatien, in a tone that was uncompromisingly direct. 'I assume you c
ame here out of curiosity.'

'I came to accompany Leanda and Nicole,' replied XZ. 'They are at a formative stage of development, and asked that I should accompany them to La Coste. They have come to acknowledge me as their teach
er.'

'La Coste,' said Donatien, with a considerable pride, 'is an ancient establishment, and one in which mystic illumination is attained through extreme sexu
al practises. Do you not feel threatened here?'

XZ smiled.
‘Not in the least,' he said. 'I am always present and absent. To have undergone our particular initiation is to experience many different levels of consciousness at the same time. I'm both here and wherever I choose to be.'

Donatien sensed himself pri
ckling at XZ's elusiveness. He found the man's lack of physical palpability impossible, and so too his evident asexuality. He could find no access to XZ's vulnerabilities, and in this respect regarded him as an alien. He felt estranged from him on every level, but could not help feeling that XZ genuinely carried within him the blueprint to a post-human species.

'I feel La Coste can offer you little,' he found himself saying. 'Tomorrow I shall marry my sister in the chapel, so as to bond our lineage. You will probably disapprove of such a ceremony, and particularly of the incestuous relationship I have been conducting with my sister for centuries. It is through sexual union that I have received the visions that have allo
wed Marciana and I to live as the deathless ones within the walls of our château. Tomorrow these rites will be consummated by marriage.'

XZ showed no
t the least sign of shock at Donatien's revelations, Instead he sat back deeper in his chair and sipped at a glass of water.

'We all have our own destinies,' he said. 'Mine is to help others achieve theirs through sen
sitised inner light. That and no more.'

Donatien allowed himself to enter the erotic reveries attendant on his forthcoming marriage. The most minute particulars of details pertaining to lingerie and dress should be observed, and he would outline his specificatio
ns to Nina that night. A pair of panties suitable to the union would have to be selected, so too a gown that would both eroticize and ceremonialize the occasion. Donatien intended the event to be an immemorial extravaganza, and slaves were to work all night in preparing the chapel for the ceremony. He cut himself free of these imaginings, and again made himself present to XZ.

'Will you
attend our marriage?' he asked.

'I may be on another frequency at that time,' said XZ.
‘I’ve communications to make with other stations in the galaxy. And there are the disciplines I pursue on a daily level. We meditate and tune ourselves into the universe. As prototypes of the new species we have to work hard at maintaining the right energy levels. I will probably be in meditation at the time of your marriage.'

Donatien avoided
being perceptibly ruffled by XZ’s imperturbable cool. He was beginning to regret having allowed XZ admission to La Coste, and was determined not to permit him entry to the castle's subterranean mysteries.