by Jeremy Reed
Marciana rippled with acquiescence at Donatien's suggestions. Her body went through the sinuous affirmations of a pond chiming with raindrops. She longed to be moulded to his body in eternity. No other man could hold out any interest for her, and like her brother she viewed the orgiasts with a degree of contempt for the limitations of their sexual pleasure. Their orgasms to her mind would short-circuit in frustrated nihilism. They would never know the march on the mystic interior that Donatien achieved with her in his sodomitical lovemaking.
Donatien continued to cover Marciana in red roses, spiking them in her hair, and crushing the petals into the palms of her hands. Both were conscious of XZ's inquisitive lenses focused on their withdrawal from the other orgiasts.
'This castle is the physical shell of our bodies,' Donatien confided to Marciana. 'When we die, the walls and the roof will collapse. The vineyards will revert to dust and stone. The people here will be fucking in the middle of a wasteland.'
Marciana said nothing. She lived inside her brother’s impulses, and lived only for that. His assertions were her truths, and his body an extension of her own. She was looking forward to the hour in which they would retire to the master bedroom, and begin their way of fucking to know visionary truth.
The savagely whipped orgiasts had reassembled into nuclear force, and this time the nymphomaniacal redhead was clinging to a man's back, while a duet of female lovers licked her clitoris. The young androgynous man had recovered enough of his sexual energies to be buggered by a member of the harem. He found himself replicating the ecstatic measures of orgasm that only thirty minutes ago he had been imparting to the redhead. He had switched roles from active to passive and was in the act of finding the one as pleasurable as the other. To Donatien it looked as though the young man had become the redhead, and was learning through the experience what it was like to be a woman.
The sexual proceedings were temporarily 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 busy 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 being 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 the 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 escaped 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 stood back and reviewed his work, and the two men wh
o 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, before 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 sisterbehind 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 books 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 library 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 the 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 cryonics 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 existing 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,' s
aid 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.'