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

there's some kind of problem come up."

"Uh-huh," said Howie, musing on his close escape. Dad drove on, chopping lanes and booting the gas
pedal as if a politician was after his vote.

"Howie," he said presently, "was that a bunch of girls I saw you playing with just then?"

"Uh-huh," he replied.

Dad cleared his throat; "How many times have I told you ..." he changed track ... "what will all the other
boys in class say? Do you want them to think you're interested in girls?"

Howie, who did want them to think that (because it was a kind of grown-up thing to do), and who wasn't
about to tell Dad of all people just what he'd been doing with those girls -- or about to have had done to
him -- kept his mouth zipped. "Aw, Dad," he whined.

"Don't you aw Dad me, young man," said Fred, who was bitterly afraid that Howie was going to
disappoint him. His knuckles whitened on the steering wheel at the thought of Howie growing his hair
long and having his ears pierced and enslaving himself voluntarily before the juggernaut of bizarre
fashions, all in the interests of catching a member of the opposite sex. "It's not healthy, Howie. If you go

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 A Boy and his God

on like this your mom is going to have to take you to see the doctor, you know that? You naughty boy!
And at your age too!" He resolved to talk to Mom about this, later, in private. Howie rolled his eyes but
kept quiet. When they got home Dad made it obvious that he was in the doghouse, so he went into the
backyard to relate to Junior. He curled up in the corner of the kennel and Junior leaned up against him
and gibbered affectionately to the beat of his cassette player. Howie ran fingers through his slimy palps
and toyed with one of his longer tentacles until Junior rolled over and presented his dryish tongue to be
scratched, but nothing Junior did could shift his master's depression. Eventually the tape came to the
end, so Howie flipped sides and pressed playback before Junior could sit up and beg; he seemed to have
a thing about the Dead Kennedys, which was okay by Howie.

"It's awful," he sighed. "Miss Jones won't go away if I ignore her, whatever she says, and Candy pulled
my pigtail and was horrible to me and her gang're going to beat me up and what'm'I'goin'to DO, Junior?
Answer me that, mm? Gonna get stomped by girls and Dad thinks I'm hanging around and I'm unhappy.
Watcha gonna do?"

Burble, said Junior.

Now Howie had listened when mom told him why not to pray to Junior, but it seemed to him that if he
ever needed a friend it was now. Mom didn't take him to the doctor, but bottles of little white pills
appeared in the bathroom cabinet and she kept after him with injunctions to keep taking his vitamins so
he'd grow up to be a big boy. Howie did -- all the way to Junior, who developed quite a taste for
stanozolol and androsterone. Howie stopped hanging about late and taking his time leaving school, so
even though Candy carried on pulling his pigtail and whispering obscene, lascivious suggestions in his
ear when Miss Jones wasn't looking he didn't get beat up. Not yet, anyway.

When they'd bought him, Junior had been about the size of a large terrier. He was growing large on a