Free The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus by Jeremy Reed

authority was indisputable. He didn't need to state things. He spoke the truth. Leanda was fascinated by his neural charge. No-one she had met had ever come from such a big interior space. Each time he looked at her it was as though he had travelled through the galaxies to meet up with his eye pupils. And it wasn't unnerving. His aura was one of invincible calm. Green, silver and purple spilled from him as a vibrational halo. He took in everything, but objects were clearly incidental to his inner perceptions. Leanda knew that gurus needed money to finance foundations and projects, and this she was prepared to offer. She imagined writing a cheque, sealing it in a gold envelope, and sending her servant out to XZ's car with the keys, so he could unlock it and place the envelope in the dashboard. It would require that sort of sensitivity to get him to accept. Or she could do it by direct transfer, but she was a ritualistic person and preferred the idea of a gold envelope.
    XZ had all the time in the world about everything. He took in the environment without comment. The library gave him the impression that he had exchanged one glass terrarium for another. He told Xenia as he picked up a silver juggling ball from a black bowl on the glass-topped table, that he had arrived at the notion of symmetry.
    'Cosmological expansion is isotropic,' he remarked. 'It's like this spherical ball. It displays no directional bias. Life should be like that in proportion to death. One's psychic chemistry increases only in accordance to universal vibration.'
    He extracted a book from its shelf, and said, ‘The message reaches us in diverse ways. I used to read everything I could on psychic research, cosmology, space travel, the now obsolete figure of the astronaut, but of course we, our cult, realised that everything occurs in inner space. The great discoveries are made at the interior.'
    He opened the book a nd appeared to read at chance. “In the contra-terrene universe that lies beyond Andromeda, a man becomes a star, and a star becomes a man. One is a black radiating body in a white space." You could spend a lifetime exploring that concept, or any other notion connected with extraterrestrial intelligence, but we chose to go in a different direction. We reversed interplanetary travel and directed the telescopes inward. As a non-initiate you can only receive certain information from me, and nor would it benefit you to do other.'
    Leanda watched as the man took a dark blue capsule out of a star-shaped pill container, manoeuvred it into his hand, and swallowed it with the mineral water he had requested on arrival. Part of her wondered if his remove wasn't drugs. He appeared chemically spaced. The sceptic in her imagined he was flipping into pharmaceutical travel. She was conscious, whatever the validity of his claims, of someone who affec ted mystique. His gestures were stylised, his needs different. And given her cultivation of the bizarre, she could accommodate his drug interests. She could feed him lines of cocaine coloured by food dyes to his preference. He could snort green, scarlet or cobalt crystals. She would stop at nothing for his knowledge. She would reinvent the vocabulary of decadence to appease his nerves. The château was a centre from which to conduct sensory experiment.
    XZ sat back in his chair and looked up at the skylight. The glass was dark blue like the gelatin shell of the capsule he had just swallowed. Leanda couldn't access this man's emotions. The positioning and repositioning of her legs u sually served as the focus of visual attention. XZ transmitted no sexual impulses. Her curiosity was heightened by his neutrality. What she wanted to how was how the deathless have sex, or if areas of hypnagogic meditation sensitise nervous impulses not usually associated with sexual desire. Her own controlled nymphomania wanted to learn ways of heightening orgasmic sensation. There wasn't any form of physical sex that she hadn't