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“My stuff’ll be safe, right?” I asked.

“I’m the only one who has access.” She seemed to want to ask another question but resisted.

This hesitation told me two things. One was that Chimera Twenty-Seven had a thing for my friend Mel, which most likely marked her as a freak, and two, that it was against the rules for employees of the Ministry of the Divine Orgasm to seek to fraternize with any other fellow churchgoer.

“Follow me,” she said, and I did.

We went down one hall and then turned into another. At the end of the second passageway was a pair of double doors that opened automatically as we approached. This revealed a very churchlike chamber with maybe sixty naked people sitting in pews that counted twice that number. Most of the audience were either solo or in pairs. The one-offs tended to sit alone while the couples were just that, at least then and there. I suppose that I might have been wrong in these estimations; maybe people sat next to strangers in the audience, but this I doubted.

I took a seat in the front row toward the center aisle, in front of the organ.

There were a few whispers among the naked faithful, but these were hushed and sporadic.

After a few minutes a smallish woman in her sixties walked out from somewhere behind the dais. A so-called white woman, she was deeply tanned and thin. Her breasts had been augmented but her skin was somewhat weathered from age and excessive exposure to the sun. This woman took her place at the organ. When she glanced at me, I gave her a heartfelt nod.

Not thirty seconds later a solidly built sixty-year-old strode out to take his place behind the glass podium. He was white, powerfully built and hairy, well-endowed and confident. I had to keep from staring at his penis. It was very large even though it was not at all aroused.

“Greetings and salutations, brothers and sisters who celebrate the body as well as the soul,” the minister orated.

The organist began to play what I can only call guttural and vibrating background music.

“We are travelers,” the minister continued, “who want to climb out of the grave-deep ruts we are forced to believe are our paths in these brief lives.” The distinguished-looking man glanced here and there around the room, gazing into the faces, stopping for a moment on me. “We are more than men. We are more than women. We are both more and less than human, and none of us is yet in that grave.”

“Amen,” most of the congregation said on cue.

“We are mothers, lovers, submissives, fathers, brothers, hunters and hunted…”

While the minister—I never learned his name or even his ministry sobriquet—preached, two men and two women, all of them naked, walked out into the empty space before the dais. The men were erect with choking cock rings on their hard-ons, to keep them in their rigid state. The women were a little different, in that the white one wore a belt that had a dildo in the place of a low-slung buckle. One man was Black, the other white, and the women were white and brown. The men carried a wooden table that was at least twelve feet long.

This they placed sideways before the minister.

“We are so much more than daily tasks, structured days, secret desires, and longings,” the minister preached while his minions set up. “I mean, of course we have these longings, of course we want. We want to dance…”

“Amen.”

At this amen the four performers formed two couples, woman and man, man and woman. Then they began to fuck; her on him, him on her.

“We want to rub up against each other and to run as fast and as hard as we can. We want to wake up one day and go somewhere else. We want freedom. We want freedom…”

While he talked and talked the couple would change partners now and again, man on man and women together, and then another sequence.

The thought came to me that at this kind of church meeting no one would ever get bored, and everybody would drop something in the donation plate. This idea started me laughing. I didn’t want to make a spectacle of myself, but I really couldn’t help it.

A few others among us made sounds. Some moaned; others murmured and hummed.

The performers were not quiet either. They grunted and groaned and even pulled away now and then because the pleasure was more than they could bear. At least that’s what it was supposed to look like.

“… we are these bodies, these souls,” the minister was saying. “We are cauldrons of desire, skins of fine wine. They want you in your grave walking back and forth like tigers in their cages, like dogs tied to some banister while their masters—their masters laugh and sip the blood of the people. We are the people. We are desire…”

This sermon and that sex went on for quite some time, the minister preaching to us about how much more we were, or maybe how much less we were forced to be.

“Our true power lies dormant,” he said. “Sleeping inside the gut. What we are capable of has always been bottled up, stifled, hidden from us…”

“Oh, oh, oh,” the brown woman cried, writhing precipitously on the right end of the table.

“… because they are afraid of that power.”

The Black fucker, who had been pounding the brown woman with piston-like precision, was losing control also.