The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus by Jeremy Reed

existence of parallel worlds in our own electrons. And then for some humans it might be possible to become a time machine. We wouldn't have to die because we'd know how to break the biological clock. That's not what we've discovered, but it's a theory, and one to which I subscribe.'
    He took up his glass again, his eyes avoiding Leanda's, and popped another cobalt capsule. He seemed to be on a direct flight line for the stars. Leanda was starting to feel uneasy. She couldn't twist a flex in the conversation. She wanted information about disembodied sex, or sex with extraterrestrials, and she was getting nowhere. She had read about humans being abducted by aliens, taken on ship, and having organs extracted for the purpose of alien intelligence. One girl had been placed in a gold tank, and the liquid had turned her skin transparent. The alien conducting the experiment had immediately pinpointed the area for surgery, and the whole thing had appeared to take place instantly. And in place of the organ removed the alien had transplanted one with an independent biorhythm which would go on functioning indefinitely. She wondered if there wasn't a connection here with XZ. Were his intentions predominantly and unemotively experimental?
    A cold friction pressed on Leanda’s spinal nerves. She was convinced she was in the presence of someone who had removed himself from the human race. And all the time her conceptual thinking was interspersed with erotic images. She was thinking of ways to make love to Nicole in a real tomb. She had had erected in the château grounds a black marble tomb. On a given autumn day, mist wreathing the procession, she would be carried in an open coffin to the site, and there the obsequies delivered over her body which would be dressed in nothing but a silk chiffon negligee. And there, lowered into the earth, she would embrace Nicole who had jumped down into the open coffin. She imagined the passionate lovemaking which would ensue, while the midget sprinkled earth over their convulsed bodies. The two of them would walk back to the château naked, the heavy yew trees dripping from the mist, a roaring fire in the hearth awaiting their arrival. It was a recurrent obsession of hers. Leanda liked to subvert the whole notion of conventional erotica. She planned to write a new Karma Sutra, her directives aimed solely at the perverse. Nothing natural would exist in the book.
    Her urgency to seduce XZ's apparent asexual leanings was growing progressively more intense . He was drifting so far out, he looked like he would never re-earth. At such times his eyes turned silver, and he looked like no-one at all.
    'I'll be very specific, ’ Leanda said. 'I've spent my life researching the erotic in its every form of expression. I'm interested in sex magic, cults who incorporate these practises into their beliefs, and of course in discovering new sensations. And I've the wealth to accommodate my interests. I want to know what you've discovered about sex, both before and after your deathless experience. I want in be turned on by the impossible.'
    X Z retained an air of impassive indifference. She wasn't sure if he'd even heard her requests. Again she thought of the possible influences of smack — and how he would be right out of it. If he was focused anywhere, it was right into his own mental dialogue. He picked up the tumbler attracted by the way the light was falling on its rim, and seemed obsessed by this particular. He then studied a fingernail which she had neglected to notice was varnished silver. The man was weird even by her standards, in his absolute centring in himself. She wondered what it was he had to draw on — light, energy, oracular guidance, an inner face that stared him into silence.
    She poured herself another whisky, and felt her nerves seethe to make a positive connection.
    'No amount of wealth can buy essential truth,' he was saying, more like he was answering himself than paying attention to her