“An MBA, that is what you shall have my dear Abelard,” Felicity declared, like a generous parent, at their new lodgings near Fontainebleau, the chateau having once been the residence of Napoleon. Fontainebleau was also, most opportunely, the home of a well regarded business school. For some time, she had been agonizing over Abelard’s future, having rejected most fields as either unsuitable to his character, such as anything in the humanities or unattainable, due to his late start, such as something in the hard sciences. She had reasoned that MBA’s were formed from any educated raw material, which meant that there was little specific prerequisite for an aspiring student. Her conclusion she drew from the short advertisement of a well known MBA program: ‘Successful MBA candidates, while displaying a remarkably wide range of backgrounds and experiences, are distinguished by a combination of academic excellence, international awareness, strong interpersonal skills and the potential to succeed as a leader/manager in a competitive business environment’.1 The last bit looked to her as though it could have been written specifically for Abelard’s memories. Within two years her prize pupil would have all the other requirements. Then one year at the school, in the accelerated MBA program, and he will be a perfectly desirable candidate for a career in business. She could not have been more pleased with the plan.
And, it felt good to have a plan. It gave her resolve and a foundation on which to purposefully apply her considerable industry. Felicity had many doubts about Abelard but none about his intelligence or his limitless capacity to quickly adapt. She could not explain why the single memory he possessed and that she suspected was real should be about the small jewelled cross. Abelard’s story around the artifact was another matter. She considered it a pure fabrication. The Society was too fantastic for her to put much store by; although, it would have been a helpful convenience to do away with her disquiet over his callous dispatch of the helpless thug. But where would he have come by such a far-fetched conspiracy theory? There was little doubt that someone was after him for what he was before waking up. She also sifted through a few scenarios: secret government agents after a rogue operative; gangsters looking for a dishonourable thief who may have absconded with everybody’s share of ill gotten gains; members of a cult seeking to finish a botched ceremony or, the one she most hoped for; mistaken identity. In the end, she opted to stop thinking about it rather than choose among poor alternatives.
She also thought a great deal, more than she cared to admit, about why Abelard had not made any attempt to become more intimate with her. Although she tried as much as she could to emphasize all her qualities other than personal appearance, she knew that she was not an unattractive woman. She was also quite certain that over the past six months Abelard had not tended to his natural urges even if he did shamelessly ogle every woman, within a surprisingly wide range of shapes, ages and looks, whenever the opportunity arose. It’s not as though she didn’t sometimes also try to entice him, despite her fears.
Here was a man, whose recourse to extreme violence was altogether without measure, able to resist what were sometimes the most unsubtle of invitations. Perhaps her more intimate garments were not as daring as she imagined when she would burst through into his room ostensibly to offer him an afternoon snack? Should she swallow her disgust at the drivel that passes for women’s magazines, and research how their vapid readers were choosing to seduce their quarry? Such hard and fast men did not normally wait for permission to take what they wanted and most often they wanted sex. Was it her? Was she simply not his type? She had thought for a while that he might be gay. But his indiscreet leering convinced her to reject that hypothesis.
She did finally step forward with what she thought was a clever ruse only to get an explanation she found wanting. They were friends, she said, and she wanted him to understand that intimacy between them was out of the question. Much to her distress, he quickly agreed. He did assure her that he loved her dearly and desired her greatly but had taken a vow that between them it could never be more than courtly love. It fell flat with her as something from his fabricated past, when knights would be intimate but completely abstemious with women that circumstances put out of their reach. They would be their defenders, give and receive gifts but never step across the invisible barrier to joyful promiscuity. Felicity put this down to the common ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ rejection pretext.
Felicity could bare only so much obsession. She would stop wasting her spare time thinking about the missing relation and concentrate rather on her own career, which she would advance through prolific publication while she was still registered as a post-doctoral student. She felt confident that at the end of the four year Abelard plan she would easily find a good position at a ranked university. There remained still the pressing reality that she too needed some distraction and had hoped Abelard would fill that gap. He was a rugged individual, a sort of large blond Scarface, more than adequately within her standards of male attractiveness. But all else having failed she could not very well overpower him. A surprising turn of events would soon change all that.
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The Perfect Human: An Abelard Chronicles Book Page 33