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

"Look Howie, it's nothing big," Mom told him on the first morning of term. "Everybody has to go through it. Look at me Ц 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 Ц" he subsided into gasps of outrage at the very thought that he might mispronounce their names to entertaining effect.
"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 Ц Howie was turning into a big boy, just like his father Ц 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!"
"Ooh." Candy screwed her face up around an 'O' of a mouth and looked ever so faintly amused. "Kiddie's got a pet god, has he? Wanna put your god up against my pit bull terrier?" She grinned mockingly and Howie noticed some things about her; mascara and lipstick and a black leather jacket. Candy was growing up, already apeing her elders, and she hung out with a bunch of older girls.
He was about to come out with a crushing rejoinder when an iron pair of fingers clamped themselves to the back of his neck and forcibly rotated his head. "And what have we got here?" asked Miss Jones, in her Number Two (scathing) tone of voice. "A silly Ц shake Ц little Ц rattle Ц boy, not paying attention in class!"
Ouch. Yes, very silly. Howie looked up and Miss Jones looked down with all the concilliatory charm of a rattlesnake. "And what have you got to say for yourself?" she asked, the personification of steely retribution. The room fell silent around her, for all the world loves an execution. "Talking in class, idle chatter, and not paying attention. Do you know what happens if you stop paying attention?" she boomed.
Howie winced in anticipation. "You stop existing?" he asked hesitantly. Thwack! came the sound of a smart clip round the ear.
"Guess again", Miss Jones said drily as she returned to the front of the class and retrieved her chalk. "Now as I was saying ..."
The day dragged on into dystopian distemper for Howie, and when the bell finally rang he ran out into the afternoon sunlight as fast as he could. That was a mistake. Candy's gang was hanging out just past the gate, and they were all there waiting for him; Bernice and Lilly the Pink and Tarantula deVille who was heavily into black lace and studs; and the big, sullen one they all called Helen J. Uh oh, he thought, but he wasn't tempted to repeat his solipsistic experiment out here, not after his disastrous failure to dispell Miss Jones that morning. He steeled himself as he walked towards them.
"Hiya kiddy," shouted Candy. "Think I don't exist, huh?"
Oh shit, he thought. I think, therefore I'm not here ...
"Yeah, kid," drawled Bernice, crop haired number two to Candy's El Presidente pose, she who was by right lawful custodian of the gang ghetto blaster which even now perched upon a wall, overloading with transients from something ominously hardcore; "you wanna mess with us?" She pushed herself away from the wall with a swing of her ample hips and shambled towards him like a great irritated bear. Tarantula deVille leered at him and went back to preening long black fingernails that glinted ominously in the sunlight.
"You and whose army?" Howie swore, looking round desperately. There at the other end of the street was mom's Buick, rounding the corner with light gleaming from the chrome. "Hey, gotta go," he sang out; "'less you want my mom to jump on you!" He turned and sped across the road. If wishes were fishes, he ruminated, his dinner'd be awfully boring.
It was dad behind the steering wheel. "Your mom's going to be home late," he said brightly as they pulled away from the turbulent stormclouds of adolescent experience. "She's staying over at the office; 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 Ц or about to have had done to him Ц 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 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 Ц 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 diet of red meat, anabolic steroids and prayer. He slept with his tentacles in the open air, twitching faintly as he dreamed of whatever it is Elder Ones dream of; on more and more nights he sneaked stealthily out of his kennel and down the manholes, until the public health inspectors came to look at the sewers and scratched their heads in wonder and pronounced the town rat-free for the first time in living memory. Mom had to get out her saw and enlarge the kennel opening.
"He just growed," Howie confided to his friends at school Ц 'Fingers' Freddy and The Worm, who oohed and aahed appreciatively. Neither of them had a god, although The Worm had a pet snake which spent most of its time asleep and didn't notice if you prayed to it. It didn't grow either, nor did it gibber at the full moon and rattle its tentacles on the picket fences when it went skateboarding with Howie. Howie had an old walkman from when he was a kid, and he rigged it so that the headphones fit a couple of Junior's orofices Ц whether they were ears or not he wasn't certain, but they sure looked funny and Junior seemed to like it Ц so that he could listen to the Dead Kennedys as he rolled down the sidewalk on his red skateboard. Yes, even if Howie was unhappy and uncertain at school his pet god was doing just fine; he even had a worshipper, and what more can any self-respecting deity ask than that?
(Lots, actually.)
As autumn wore on, the nights grew longer. Candy tormented him intermittently, asked him to go out with her then had a good laugh at him with her gang when he refused out of knock-kneed terror. Going out with her, while not a totally repulsive prospect, would expose him to the Gang ... and girls in gangs are utterly different to girls on their own. So she continued to pull his pigtail in class Ц almost coyly, as if to retain his interest Ц and hang out downtown at night.
Late one afternoon, Miss Stead Ц who was, if anything, more fearsome than Miss Jones Ц lectured them about the evils of logical positivism. She closed her big textbook with a thud and a spurt of dust, just as the bell rang. "Now go and be good children and read chapter seven before your next lesson, all of you!" she said. "And remember that the test next Tuesday will cover Bertrand Russell and the post-Godelian numerotheologists!" Candy yawned elaborately behind Howie: who didn't look round, so he didn't see that her brace had emigrated to leave a spotless bite and sultry lips that could have graced a film star. He packed his books and stood up, then Candy grabbed him from behind.
"Hey!" he protested.
"Yeah?" she said. "You a kiddy, kiddy? Or are you a man?"
"I'm a boy!" he protested hotly. "I'll set my god on you Ц"
"Good," she said, tightening her grip round his throat playfully. "You wanna go to the pictures tonight?"
"I gotta walk Junior," he gasped.
"Aw, fuck." She pronounced it with the breathless reverence of one who had just discovered what the word meant and wondered if it was fun. "You're no good, Kiddy. Hey, I betcha you don't so have a god, anyway!" She let go of his throat and stepped back.
"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.
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 Ц although he got a wolf-whistle from Bernice Ц 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 Ц" 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.
"Betcha he isn't," said Candy, captivated. The light of the setting sun sparkled fire through Howie's hair, and she just knew that he was an innocent young thing waiting for the hot taste of her lips to awaken passionate desires supressed for too long by, by ... she shook her head, at a loss for adjectives. "Here, take this," she said, passing her hamburger remnants to Helen J., who looked at them in deep disgust (being a vegan). She swaggered out into the road, hips swinging and cowboy boots clacking on the blacktop, to meet her paramour and rival.
"Hiya kiddy," she said, chewing non-existent gum and looking him in the eye. "Glad ya could make it. Who's this here friend o' yours?"
Howie, for his part, stared at her, noticing for the first time that the brace was gone from her teeth, that her hair was short and extremely sexy, that he was male and she wasn't, and that despite all his mothers' conditioning (ideologically sound in view of the population explosion) he was still of heterosexual bent, and that his jeans were embarassingly tight. "Uh," he said.
Candy bent over Junior, who bounced up and down on the board menacingly and clacked his Ц or rather, her Ц claws together. "Come on," she said, don't be coy! "Who are you?"