"Charles Stross - A Boy And His God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

"I do too," he said trenchantly. "I pray to it as well!"

"Yoo hoo!" she whistled sarcastically. "A real gawd. You going to show me, kiddy?"

"If you want." Sullen now, Howie was beginning to see how this short-haired freckle-faced imp had
outmanoeuvred him.

"Okay," she said. "See you tonight, right? Out by Fat Mac's."

"Hey, ah," he said, but she'd already gone, doubtless to tell her gang to be there or be square to see her
seduce him or something ghastly. What was he going to do? His mind boggled.


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 A Boy and his God


That evening saw Howie in a real tizzy. He fiddled and put in his best earrings and pulled on his best
levis and running shoes. Then he got out the skateboard and Junior obligingly hopped on and waited
while Howie put on his headphones. "You're going to behave now, you hear me?" Howie prayed. "And
everything's going to be right, right, 'cos you're going to make it right, right? A-men!" He pressed the
play button and Junior belched to the beat of Holiday in Cambodia, rocked to Kalifornia Uber Alles, and
waved his tentacles as Howie towed him out onto the sidewalk. In the dim light he seemed to glow with
the repressed energy of prayers and steroids, vibrating and shimmering at the edges as if his skateboard
was surfing through extraplanar realities in a cosmos too vast and terrible for human senses to
comprehend.

(Actually, Junior was surfing through an n-dimensional spatial construct. Howie was lamentably blind to
the cosmic influences of the higher planes; to the snowflakes of light that whirled in an everlasting
blizzard through the vast spaces of infinite insanity: and to the window into emptiness which the power
of his prayer had opened. Harmless in and of himself though Junior was, nevertheless something
horrifying had been activated within his diminutive frame by the pernicious virus of belief. Steroid-fed
and anarchic, a spirit of pure evil was growing, pulsing in time to the punk rock overspill which Howie
had unknowingly attached to some of Junior's genitals in mistake for ears. As he was to discover ...)

Candy and her gang were hanging out at the crossroads MacRonalds, stuffing their faces, when along
the boulevard came the oddest sight any of them had ever seen. It wasn't so much the cute boy with the
earings and blond hair and designer jeans that turned their heads -- although he got a wolf-whistle from
Bernice -- but his companion who stunned them. A large, quivering lump of tentacles, claws, palps,
lubricious orofices and quivering eye stalks was rare enough on these mean streets. To see this self-same
lump riding a red perspex skateboard and listening to the Dead Kennedys on a walkman added a unique
touch. Jaws dropped; fragments of masticated cow landed in the dirt, unnoticed.

"Shit", breathed Candy, with the reverence of the truly surprised. "Do you see where the headphones --"
she stopped. Unlike Howie she didn't need labels for labia.

"Do you believe it?" drawled Tarantula deVille to her sister Mortitia, who'd come along for the ride.
"The boy's balling a ball!" Mortitia sniggered knowingly, even though she was too young and naive to
understand.