Free Fireworks in the Rain by Steven Brust Page B

foreclosures here in Las Vegas? High enough that he could do some good, low enough that it wouldn’t be noticed? I concentrated on what I was looking for, holding it firmly in my mind. I wasn’t as good as Jimmy, but then, this wasn’t a terribly challenging search.
    I tasted rocky road ice cream, which has never been a favorite, but I knew that was it. The appearance and the tactile sensation of an ice cream cone appeared, and I took some onto my tongue, and I knew the guy’s name: Peter Washington. From there, it was just a matter of scouring, searching, inspecting, collecting; a long process, but one I’ve done thousands of times. My favorite way to address the metaphor is to imagine myself with a light-weight shoulder bag into which I throw each new discovery, figuring that when the weight gets annoying I’m done.
    Peter has two computers—home, and work. The home computer appeared as a table saw; all I had to do was turn it on. The work computer was an icicle, and, after playing around a bit, I licked it like a kid, and that did the trick. I checked his email on both, but the only thing worth making a note of were his plans for the next couple of days. He had some porn on his home computer (like, who doesn’t?), but nothing that was important enough to him for me to exploit.
    Then it was time to hunt for switches.
    Human beings never stop generating sense memories tied to a moment of precise emotion. You remember that song that makes you think of your first lover? How about the smell of your first new car? If you have a passion for, say, horse racing, how many sounds, sights, and smells go with that, and how do they make you feel? We’re constantly creating new switches, but the most reliable ones are generated between the ages of four and nine. That’s when we lock in the scent of our mother’s hair, or the roughness of grampa’s beard, or the sound of a favorite lullaby, or the smell of sawdust as daddy works on a project, or, well, dozens of others. I spent my time looking and sniffing around that area of Mr. Washington’s life.
    He was thirty-one years old, straight, white, originally from New Jersey, and had spent the springs and summers on a farm in Iowa (returning to the usual, “Around here we pronounce it Ohio. Ha ha ha”). He’d majored in business at Kansas State, where’d he’d also lettered in track, doing the high and low hurdles and anchoring the four by four. I made a note of his college nickname. He was a smart runner; he loved the strategy of racing, as well the thrill of pushing his body to its limits. The smell of fresh-cut hay made him feel safe; long, slow sunrises woke him up faster than coffee; the taste of salted and buttered corn-on-the-cob right from the field, thrown into boiling water for not more than four minutes, gave him a pleasure almost erotic in its intensity. And here was an odd one: in all of my long life, until now, I had never realized that, on hot nights in the summer, you can sometimes hear corn growing. I mean, literally, actually hear it. Did you know that? Peter Washington did, and he loved that sound.
    I put it in the bag, and continued.
    More of the same—things in his life that meant something emotionally: triggers. Those of us who work with them call them switches. They weren’t hard to find—not when just about any information that is coded in symbol and transmitted from anyone to anyone can make its way into the Garden. It isn’t hard, it’s just tedious.
    I became aware that I was hungry. There are plenty of things to eat in the Garden, but none of them provide nutrition, or do anything about real-world hunger. I decided I was done and opened my eyes.
    I’d spent four hours in the Garden. No wonder I was hungry. After taking care of other biological necessities, I checked the refrigerator and the freezer, and decided that frozen pizza did not sound attractive. After careful consideration for about three seconds, I called my favorite Chinese place