the simultaneity montage

The definitive Tavis-charm set-piece, overheard by Pemulis and Struck through Lateral Alice's intercom. Tavis spends the morning "interfacing" with the parents of the children maimed in the Eschaton free-for-all — children his Academy failed to protect — and comes off "a Houdini with the manacles of fact," the meetings "like fluidless seductions." The parents leave weeping, pumping his hands one per hand, "practically begging him to accept both their thanks and their apologies for daring to even possibly think, even for a moment," and drive very slowly down the hill before they realize they forgot to visit their injured kid at all. This is the succession's public genius: the administrator who can take the manacles of an indefensible fact and slip them, turning the parents of the harmed into supplicants apologizing to him. Set against the two-Tavises menace, it's the charm face of the same competence that holds the family enterprise together.