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

along the sidewalk, Howie weaving his skateboard from side to side and Junior racing to and fro across
front lawns, gibbering and leaving a thin trail of slime in his efforts to keep up. Sometimes they
swapped, and Howie would jog along huffing and puffing while Junior rumbled after him on the 'board.
As they passed the neat white picket fences lining the road, hounds would bark frantically and cats
would spit from the cover of bushes; but Howie didn't care. At school he would look at his fellow fifth-
graders with a gleam in his eye; I bet your pet can't ride a skate board, he would sneer to himself. And it
was true. This was a small town, and skateboarding elder gods were as thin on the ground as hang-
gliding rabbis.

The summer recess stretched into a halcyon period of long, hot evenings and quiet, starlit nights.
Sometimes during the early hours, Howie would be awakened by the noise of scraping from the back
yard. Junior was quite smart for a deity, and had mastered the art of letting himself out whenever he felt
like going for a midnight ramble. He was always back by dawn though, and nobody mentioned the
matter unless Junior was careless and left a manhole cover open by mistake.

But the year rolled on towards autumn, and that September Howie was due to start sixth grade. He didn't
want to go back to school -- Aw, mom, -- what kid does? But he had to.

"Look Howie, it's nothing big," Mom told him on the first morning of term. "Everybody has to go
through it. Look at me -- I was at school once, you know? And look what it made of me!" Howie looked
up at her through the wrong end of a conceptual telescope. He was still of an age when cause and effect
were confusing.

"But I don't want to know all about Nietzche or Sartre," he complained; "they got funny names and Miz
Jones laughs at me when I, when I --" he subsided into gasps of outrage at the very thought that he might
mispronounce their names to entertaining effect.



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 A Boy and his God

"There, there!" soothed Mom. "You'll see, it's not that bad! If you don't learn about existential
philosophy and logical positivism in school, how can you expect to earn a living in this world? What'll
you do when you grow up?" She picked him up and hugged him, grunting slightly with the effort --
Howie was turning into a big boy, just like his father -- and looked him in the eye. "And don't you worry
about Miss Jones. I'm sure she doesn't mean anything, but if she does ... well, your mom used to be a
mud-wrestler, right?" She swung him in a loop until he laughed like crazy and struggled, then set him
down again. "Now eat your shreddies, dear! Have you fed Junior today?"

"Naw," he said sullenly. "Dad said he would."

Anyway, it fell to Sophie to drive Howie to school and drop him off there with all the other kids. Howie
had by this time convinced himself that he was going to have an awful day, so indeed he did;
existentialism had nothing on his angst, which expressed itself to the full when Candy Jessup, who had
freckles and red hair and a brace and sat behind him, tugged his pigtail when Miss Jones wasn't looking.
It was a lesson about Descartes, so it probably didn't happen anyway. Howie turned round and snarled at
her, quietly and with awesome ferocity: "I've got a skateboarding god who bites and I'm going to set him
on you after school, so there!"