The Pleasure Chateau: The Omnibus by Jeremy Reed Page A

question. He shifted neither his eyes nor his voice over to her direction. He kept on staring at the rim of his glass. 'You've got every reason to believe that sex need not be attached to the physiological body. It can and often is a psychic manifestation. I don't know what you could be imagining. But if you're sufficiently trained in meditation techniques, then of course it's possible to make love by thought transfer. Get a friend to sit with you, in front of you, and make it happen. It's simple. You each communicate a preconceived image. It may be a position, a violation or whatever turns you on. And by isolating the image, you can frictionalise it to orgasm. That's the simplest technique, and it elevates mutual masturbation to a level of thought contact. But it takes a long time to perfect. But you can apply it to all the erogenous zones, so that eyes, ears, nipples, noses, and all the areas that don't normally get in on sex end up in contact. Imagine coming through polarising your third left fingernail to your partner's. No-one's ever tried to have sex that way. The erotic impulses are in need of being re-zoned. Contact between a penis and a vagina, a penis and an anus has gone on replicating itself for a whole genetic history. It's time we freed the body, or rather you did, as members of the cult have already gone beyond those limitations.'
    'And that's where I want to go,' Leanda replied. 'You tell me of general theories, intended techniques, but I want to know the truth.'
    But he was gone off again, only this time he stood up, and walked in slow circle round the glass table. But it wasn't like he was looking at anything. She could see that intense concentration really had turned his eyes silver.
    'You've heard the story,' he said, 'how we were out there at the beach. Ten of us. Five men and fi ve women. It was far more valid than a lunar landing, for we had created our own time and space. Even if someone had shown up, they couldn't have broken the circle. It was locked tight into imaginary time. We were travelling. We got beyond biorhythms. These aren't small things, and they're also scientifically disputable. What happened beyond that is what we're still researching. Only initiates are permitted access to that knowledge. If you study, and have an aptitude for it, you may in time share our discoveries.'
    'But on a level of the senses, ' Leanda urged, 'my concern is only with the erotic.'
    'You can't separate the erotic from its psychic components,' he replied, 'to go that way is in the nature of death. There are things I could tell you that would be greater than anything you've discovered at the château, but they would be useless to you. We learn only from things we can assimilate.'
    Leanda narrowed her eyes at his imperturbable composure. He wanted nothing of her and she wanted everything of him. There had been no uptake to her implied offer of a gift. And if he accepted, she knew it would be with contemptuous indifference. He was unreachable because he contained the secret that others needed. She recrossed her long legs, feeling the itch in her and imagining all the men and women in the world who would like to have possessed her at that moment. She saw herself wiggling down a city street, eyes smouldering on her bottom, their intensity touching her skin like burn marks. She would get high on this game; the idea of men and women going home and masturbating over her image. XZ wouldn't do that. She was sure of his asexual reserve. Instead she fantasised about going into a shoe shop, and having the pretty assistant tickle her toes, while she tried on an endless variety of high heels, her short skirt affording the girl copious glimpses of her panties, tantalisingly erotic flashes that would lead in the end to her inserting a finger there, then two, despite the other customers, and finally working her little provincial tongue up her stockinged thighs, fractionally nearer and nearer her crotch. As the girl was about to