Bone Dance

Bone Dance

Emma Bull

In the pitiless post-apocalyptic future, Sparrow's confusion and self-doubt are more than mere teenage angst. How much more may determine the future. Mixing symbolism from the Tarot deck, voodoo mythology, and a finely detailed vision of life and technology after the nuclear war, Bull has come up with yet another winner. Sparrow's video-age consciousness has obvious appeal for the MTV generation. A tense, ferocious dance on the deteriorating high wire of the future.

Nominated for Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1991.

Nominated for Hugo and World Fantasy awards in 1992.

Bone Dance

by Emma Bull

Dedication…

Cyn Horton gave me the matches. Elise Krueger held the candle while I lit it. The following umpty-ump thousand words are dedicated to both of them. Thanks, guys.

… and acknowledgments

A book, like a building, needs a proper foundation; Tom Canty, Terri Windling, and Will Shetterly helped to lay the underpinnings for this one. But any doors out of true or stairs that lead nowhere are my fault.

I owe thanks to Jerry Blue, Denise Habel, Tom Grewe, Magenta Griffith, Mitch Thornhill, and Tony Taylor for their generous assistance with construction materials, to Howard Davidson for inspecting some of the wiring, to Tom Juntunen and Will Shetterly for help in hanging pictures, and to April Anderson for the secret blueprints of the Norwest Bank building. Still more thanks to Beth Fleisher, who understood when the tract house became the Winchester Mansion.

This edifice has been inspected by the Minneapolis Scribblies, for which inspection the author is darn grateful, you betcha. Additional building code compliance supplied by Cupertino Decon-struction: Jon Singer and Gordon Garb.

The section headings are paraphrased from Bill Butler’s Dictionary of the Tarot (Schocken Books, 1978), a wonderful book for anyone interested in the comparative symbolism and interpretation of the tarot.

Card 0: The Significator:

Page of Swords

Crowley: The earthy part of air, the fixation of the volatile, the materialization of idea. Subtlety in material things, cleverness in managing practical affairs, especially if they are controversial.

Gray: A brown-haired, brown-eyed boy or girl. Possible understanding or knowledge of diplomacy, messages, or spying. Watch out for the unforeseen.

0.0: The stock exchange

The room was dark. The room was always dark, because it had no windows; it ought not to have meant anything. But the way the shadows hung like drapery around the desk; the way the crook-necked lamp cast its measured oval of light on the polished rosewood; the way the silence lay on the room, unbroken by the hiss of a gas mantle; the way the faint, faint smell of petroleum and electricity, like the odor of wealth itself, rose up from everywhere — these things gave the darkness meaning. Nothing in that room was incidental.

The customer sat behind his desk, in a chair so tall and wide it could have hidden two bodyguards. He leaned away from the light, and it from him. Maybe he’d read somewhere that hiding one’s face made for psychological advantage in business transactions. He was welcome to think so. He already had the only real advantage: money. All the rest was costume and props.