"Laura Anne Gilman - Staying Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gilman Laura Anne)

directed attention rather than illuminated.

There was one door. No windows. The overall impression was of endless space somehow made cozy.
An architect had labored over the lines and arches of this space, a designer had meditated on the perfect
shade of white for the walls and ceiling, a feng shui specialist had dictated the ordering of the floor's
wooden planks, the exact placement of the three objects which resided therein in relation to the door.

It was for those three objects that the room existed.

In one corner, reaching from floor to ceiling, was a simple green marble pillar, three feet around and
seven feet high. Etched onto its surface were crude symbols that hadn't seen the light of day for over
three thousand years.

In the opposite corner, an ebony wood pedestal was lit from above, highlighting a chunk of clear,
unfaceted crystal that looked as though it had just been pulled from the ground, hosed down, and
dropped onto that base.

And in the farthest corner, two men maneuvered a low wooden tray set on wheels into position. It was a
mover's trolley, its bed covered with a quilted pad similar to the kind used for fine furniture and grand
pianos. Another pad wrapped up over a four-foot by six-foot square, and was sealed with heavy gray
tape. The hard rubber wheels moved soundlessly on the floor, despite the weight they bore.

The two men were burly, but not brutish looking. One was perhaps forty, with graying hair cut short. The
other was ten years younger, and completely bald. They wore simple white coveralls that had only one
pocket in the left sleeve, too small to carry anything larger than a cigarette lighter. There were no names
sewn over the chest: no logos, cute or otherwise on their backs.

They finished adjusting the trolley, and the younger man knelt by its side, producing a slender but
sharp-looking pocket knife from his sleeve pocket, carefully cutting through the tape, peeling it away
from the pad and unfolding the pad from its enclosed prize. About the length of a small bench, the
marble's silvery-gray surface was marked and pitted, making the once-glossy surface look dull and
battered. A smaller rectangle on the top surface looked as though it had been carved out and then filled in
with concrete.

"All this, for that?"

The older man sounded disgusted. No one else was in the room, but his partner cast a worried look over
his shoulder, as though expecting someone to appear there and overhear the criticism.
"If the owner says it's art, it's art," he told his older companion firmly. "Let's just get it settled, and get out
of here." Personally, the object gave him the creeps. Hell, the entire place gave him the creeps. But he
was a professional, damn it. He was going to act like one.

A low matte black platform, installed when the room itself was built and unused until now, waited to
receive its burden. The two men took wide canvas slings that had been hung on the trolley's handle, and
fitted them around two corners of the marble block. The younger man's hand brushed the surface of the
stone where the cement plug was, and he shuddered involuntarily, stopping to look down at his hand as
though expecting to see a spider, or something else less pleasant on top of it.

"Will you stop that?" the other man snapped. "Concentrate on the job. I don't need you getting sloppy
and dumping it all on me."