Chapter Six
Relek was gone (again? still?) when I woke up. I took advantage of the silence in the apartment to take another shower. It was nice to have reliable access to a shower, even as odd as their showers were. Thankfully, I remembered enough of the controls. I might have lotioned before soaping up, but hey, that just made it easier to shave this time around.
After showering, I puttered around the kitchen area, where I found that Relek had left out a few foodstuffs for me. Which was good, because if there was a fridge — or the Reten equivalent of one — I couldn’t find it. I even tried opening cabinets, but couldn’t figure out half of them. I was going to have to have Relek show me how to use the kitchen. Made me feel a bit less of a housewife, having to be shown how to use the kitchen. Hopefully Relek would understand that it wasn’t just that I could burn water, but a true unfamiliarity with their appliances. I just wouldn’t mention that I had no idea how to use a food processor, either. He didn’t need to know that, did he?
Breakfast done and cleaned up as much as I could, I decided to reward myself for my long journey to another planet the best way I knew how. I went back to bed for a nap. It felt so good to be in a bed that I could stretch my legs out in. The bed was so big that even Relek, at his nearly eight feet tall height, didn’t have to sleep diagonally. The entire house was built for his — and the general Reten — height. The countertops in the bathroom and kitchen were all a good six inches higher than the standard ones in the US. I really hoped none of the brides coming from Earth were short. It was bad enough reaching everything from my height, and I couldn’t imagine being even shorter.
By lunch time, I was restless. And bored.
It was funny — I had been unemployed for over a month at this point, but I never felt as at odds as I did currently. Maybe it was all the stress over the mayor. Maybe it was being so busy trying to feed myself without a real kitchen, or finding a good parking spot for the night, that I didn’t have time to be bored.
But now I was really, truly, bored.
I mean, before going through the wormhole I was thinking it would be nice to be taken care of. That my husband would be rich, and support me. But the reality was different. Relek didn’t have to pay for me, and in a way, I was kinda glad about that. Sure, it wasn’t that the Earth women were being bought. But… there was a cost to bringing us across, and only the rich could afford it. Which did kind of mean we were being bought. Which would have made me feel cheap, but in this case, Relek was given me as a reward for his service. That it looked good for the head of the Security Force to have an Earth bride.
That almost made me feel more cheap than if I had been paid for. I was a gift, basically. I wasn’t even worth the same amount as the other women.
I know, that wasn’t the way to look at it. But still, part of me felt that way. Which made me want to fight it — to prove my worth. Prove that I was worth something, anything. And yeah, part of it was from being bored. But I was capable of supporting myself. I had been doing it for several years. I could do it here, too. I didn’t have to be taken care of — if anything, I could take care of my new husband. Somehow.
I explored Relek’s apartment, trying not to break anything, or poke into anything that was private police business. Which… could have been anything, since I couldn’t read his native language yet. So I was limited in my snooping.
Which was probably a good thing for my new marriage, but not so much for my curiosity.
With a lack of anything else to do, I decided to go for a walk. It would be nice to learn the neighborhood, find any local restaurants or shops, and maybe see a “now hiring” sign on a door.
Not knowing the Reten word for “now” or “hiring” would make the last item more difficult, but hey. I could learn from context.
I waved my hand in front of the elevator room thingy, and it opened smoothly. I wasn’t sure if it was open to everyone, or biometrically keyed to me. I wasn’t sure how it would have been keyed to me, but maybe it was like a fire safety thing. Kinda like in the US how you had to be able to exit a locked building from the inside, regardless of if you had a key to the outside.
I didn’t think about how I would get back inside the apartment until I was down in the garage. The garage was empty — of a vehicle, that is. There was probably a decade of bachelor life hanging from the ceiling, stacked precariously on shelving units, and piled in various messes on the floor. If I couldn’t find a job, I could definitely organize this room. It’d keep me occupied for a week, at least.
Worried about how I would access the apartment again, I grabbed a weird board/bat type thing that was leaning up against the wall next to the elevator room and put it in the doorway before the sliding door could fully close. The bat was about as long as a baseball bat, but flat and thin from the halfway point to the tip, where it turned into a scoop. It looked like a combo of a cricket bat and a scoop-ball handle. With how built Relek was, I wasn’t surprised he’d be into the local sports. I’d be curious to see how this device would be used — when I wasn’t using it to prop the door open.
The door hit the bat, and opened back up, then tried closing again. It bounced back open, and gave a couple alert beeps. I started to reach for the bat — I didn’t want the system to be yelling at me, or even call Relek home automatically — but it stopped beeping, and stayed fully open, a red light appearing where the hand-wavy panel spot was.
Eh, good enough.
I didn’t mind leaving the interior door propped open. When I lived with my parents, we never locked the door from the garage into the family room. The front and back doors, yes. The garage door had an pin code that could be entered to open it, so all I had to do was remember that code, then I could get into the house fine. Except for that one time when there was two feet of snow outside and the power had gone off, but I tried to forget about huddling for two hours in the greenhouse underneath the threadbare and hole-filled blankets used to cover plants from frost until my parents came home with a key. Except for that, it worked fine.
Okay, so if I applied the same concept of the garage doors from Earth to here, there should be a remote. Obviously remote technology worked, since Relek had hit a button on his dashboard to open the door. Surely there’d be another method, right? Maybe something pocket-sized, like if he was going for a run or something?
I poked through the shelves, trying to find any sort of organization that Relek had to the storage units. There wasn’t much. There were random bits and pieces everywhere. Finally, under a rather space-age looking (yet ratty, which was impressive) blanket, I found some miscellaneous pieces of technology. It looked to be alien equivalents of VCR’s, gaming units, coffee pots, and cabling. But most importantly, there was a small box of stone-type things, ones that looked like the device he used in the bedroom to talk to their version of dispatch.
Hoping I didn’t set off any alarms or turn on ceiling fans upstairs, I took out each remote and pointed to the garage door, and ran my fingers over the remotes trying to find the on switch/sensor.
The ninth remote was a success — the garage door opened.
“Aha!” I cheered triumphantly, addressing a sports ball on the shelf. It was the wrong size for the bat holding the elevator door open, so Relek was definitely a well-rounded sports player. It kinda made me want to see him in action, shirt off, all sweaty…
Ahem. I had to center my thoughts, and get them off of him. Otherwise I was going to need to go back into the shower, and figure out how to turn the water to cold.
I stepped outside the garage, and hit the remote, making sure it would close, but staying near enough where I could duck back under the door if necessary. Apparently it wasn’t necessary, and I wasn’t fully sure why it would be, but I was covering my bases. I didn’t want to get locked out.
I tucked my new remote into my pocket and started strolling down the street, proud of myself for figuring out the technology. Yeah, it wasn’t much in the larger scale of things, but I mastered foreign — alien — technology all by my lonesome. I applied Earth knowledge to a planet across the universe, and solved a problem. That was good, and an ego boost — it meant I could handle myself. I was all about self-sufficiency. I didn’t need someone to take care of me.
Okay, forgetting about the fact that I did need someone to marry me so I could leave the terrible situation back on Earth. And forgetting about the fact that I was dependent on Relek’s salary to live.
Dang it, I did need a job. I wanted to be with Relek, yes, and be his Earth bride and have his children so that we could help keep his race alive to the next generation. But I could do all of that while working. I was able to figure out alien technology myself — I was capable.
The neighborhood, I found, was nice. Mostly apartment-type buildings, but they may have also been four to five story office buildings. The streets were clean, and not a lot of traffic on — or over, since they had flying cars — them. Every few blocks there would be a break in between buildings for some green space. At least, on Earth it would be called green space. Here it was more orange space. The grass was in the same color family as the sun, but a paler orange. But sometimes the pocket parks would have benches to sit, which I took advantage of. There wasn’t any fountains, or tables to eat/work at. And there was never anyone in any of the orange spaces as I walked by. I figured they’d be more busy after work hours, provided the work hours here were similar to Earth.
I also wondered about the work done here on Relek. I knew there wasn’t many females — hence why the other earthlings and I were here. But those that were here, did they work? Were they in the workforce like the men, doing a wide variety of jobs? Were they treated like equals? I sure hoped so. I had had enough of the misogyny on Earth, and really hoped the same wasn’t the case here.
What kind of job could I get here? Surely there was retail, at the very least. Most societies ended up needing retail establishments, and I had done the whole working-at-the-mall thing in high school, before our mall got too run-down and scary. I’d love to get another public relations job, but knowing how hard they were to come by on Earth, at least for me after the disaster with the mayor, I figured they would be difficult to find here as well. Maybe volunteer work? Working with kids, or whatever native animals they had? Heck, I could even do basic gardening, working in the orange spaces. Or non-profit development work. Or finding a good cause, and working towards that.
I had only gone down our street and around to the next street over, and only the direction leading the right from our apartment. There were no storefronts in this direction, so I hoped there would be in one of the other directions. But I didn’t want to get lost, especially on my first day exploring, so I kept my navigation straightforward. Each day, I figured when I was walking back, I would go in a different direction from home.
By the time I got back to our apartment, it had been several hours, at least according to my watch. I was old-school — it wasn’t a smart watch, just an old analog that self-winded and didn’t need batteries. It had lasted me for years, and would even work here on an alien planet. I had great forethought when I had bought it, not even contemplating seven years ago that aliens would exist and I would marry one. But hey, at least I had a watch that worked.
The remote let me back into the garage, and I saw Relek’s car parked inside. I had butterflies take flight in my stomach — I was happy my husband was home. A touch nervous that he beat me here, since I had forgotten to leave a note, but excited to see him again.
I tossed the garage remote on the shelf closest to the elevator room, so that I knew where it was the next time I went out. The bat had been moved, it leaning up against the wall again. I waved my hand against the sensor panel, which flashed orange, then red, and then beeped at me. It didn’t open the door.
I tried again, and nothing.
Now I was glad that I had left the bat holding the door open — if I had gotten home before Relek, I’d be stuck in the garage. I needed to have him program me into the doors so I could get in by myself. I wasn’t a security expert, not like I was sure the chief of the Security Force would be, but even I knew that propping a door open wasn’t a great long-term solution.
I waved my hand against the sensor again, hoping that a third attempt would work. Not to open the door — I wasn’t so insane as to think that doing the same thing repeatedly expecting a different result would work — but in the hopes that the third attempt would send an alert to Relek that someone was attempting to enter.
Sure enough, a few seconds later I could hear the low hum of the elevator car moving towards me. I stepped back from the door, giving Relek room to exit the car if he desired.
The door slid open, and Relek stood inside, his face hard.
“Where have you been?”