He learned different on the commune. When he would sneak out of the academy dorms to go see Sara, he would see people who couldn’t describe the physical action of a lever or read the point stress of a T-beam if their lives depended on it. Yet they seemed happy. Or at least they pretended very well. They cared about things that he had never considered. Valued things that he thought of as superfluous, if at all. Something in that freedom had appealed greatly to Carter and, completely against his wishes, he’d fallen in love with the girl.
When he missed his flight out to Swan Station where he was to meet with the dean of the mechanical engineering school there, his parents became concerned, but by then it was far too late. He and Sara were already on a rather different flight: terrestrial, just a little ways south to Matagorda Island and the Villachez Spaceport, where seats were waiting for them on a commuter jump out to Unity Station (anti-motion-sickness Therazine caps and anti-emetics pressed into their hands as they rushed to the gate at the last moment, the standard effects-of-high-and-low-g safety lecture abbreviated by their late arrival) and then a ride on a small guild cruiser to Mars. Sara was outbound, headed for the university at Chryse, and Carter was more than happy just to tag along. Their liberal arts program was second to none.
For a few months, everything was wonderful. They lived together in a tiny capsule apartment under the dome—on the cheap side, but not far from the university. Sara attended classes in art and design. Carter even audited a couple, though he quickly lost interest and took a job on campus instead, using all of his years of careful education and cloistered study to patch seals and polish pipeworks at the Chryse water-generation plant. At Sara’s insistence, he avoided all attempts at contact from his brothers and his parents. They wouldn’t understand, she told him. All they wanted was for him to come back and build their stupid spaceships again. Curled together like quotation marks on their apartment’s narrow bed, they convinced each other that this was the start of their great adventure together, that everything was going to work out fine.
And when Sara eventually broke Carter’s heart for the most banal of reasons and saw him thrown out of their combined quarters and his job at the campus plant to boot, he found himself suddenly at loose ends. Gone was the security of the groove cut by his time as an engineer’s brat. Gone was the heady rush and careless bravery of rebelling against all that for what he’d thought was true love. With two brothers, a strong family unit, and years of boarding school, he’d never experienced aloneness before. He’d never faced down a day without knowing the purpose meant to be fulfilled at the end of it. It’d scared the crap out of him.
Joining NRI was what Carter’d done to replace all that he’d lost. In them, he saw a sort of salvation. They had goals, discipline, plans for the future—all that he felt he lacked in his moment of weakness. They were doing good on a galactic scale, fighting for a cause they believed in. There was other stuff, too. He couldn’t remember what, exactly, but he could remember Sara having several NRI posters on rotation on the media wall of their small container apartment, each blazing with vaguely inspirational slogans. And those slogans must’ve burned in deep enough that Carter was able to recognize the NRI logo when he saw it a couple of days later, hung over the door of a recruiting office just off campus. Looking back now, Carter knew he might just as well have walked in with Fresh Meat tattooed across his forehead. They took him in like they’d been looking for him for ages.
The NRI training camps were unpleasant places. He liked that about them. At first, being there felt like vague punishment for sins he barely understood having committed. Earthside, they had one in the Han Republic, what used to be far northern China, which was austere to the point of invisibility; another in South Africa, which existed by dint of a look-away agreement with the local government and had, as its main feature, an urban bombing range laid over what used to be Bloemfontein; a third in Washington Free State, not far from Seattle, which was where Carter first visited.
There, under the mystifying greenness of an old-growth canopy forest, he learned small-unit ground tactics, the strategies of protest, both nonviolent and active, how to deal with tear gas, riot police, stun batons, and fast-insertion. The basics of escape and evasion he picked up fast, trying to avoid the come-ons of the aggressive, militant omnisexuals who felt that the standard boy/girl-girl/girl-boy/boy modes of intimate expression were just another form of gender oppression that could be lifted only by the consumption of potent, homegrown hallucinogens and frequent participation in their creepy forced gang bangs. He also sat for interminable hours on a tree stump being harangued by various extremist commissars of the movement, told how the human race was made up of ruthless conquistadors, cultural rapists, and murderers on a genocidal scale. He was told how his presence here among the wise trees, giant slugs, and moldy assault courses wasn’t nearly enough and that he should also be willing to give up all known banking codes his family used so that their wealth might be “equitably redistributed for the defense of all native species.”