Politics Of The Games

Poul Anderson's Genesis (New York, 2001), Part One, Chapter VI, section 2.

I am having trouble with the word "auvade" (pp. 59, 61).

Wei, captain of Clan Belov, is almost seventy years older than his son, Mikel. His other children are virtual.

The customary five-year cycle of succession would have made Wei not merely one of the stewards but Supreme Steward of the Darvic Games on New Century's Eve. Further, he deserves such recognition because he:

"...served well at earlier Darvics..." (p. 60);
"...won trophies for mountaineering on the moon and dune skiing on Mars..." (p. 61);
is "...president of the national wildlife commission..." (ibid.);
negotiates between ethnoi under the Worldguide.

However, Arkezhan, Captain Socorro, Wei's enemy, is a favorite of the Chief Enactor who has prevailed upon the Regnant to make Arkhezan Supreme Steward! Young Belov clansmen drunkenly brawl with Socorros...

Laurinda Ashcroft's generation debated how to counteract an Ice Age and an interstellar nebula. Mikel and his contemporaries rage against Socorro and the Enactor. Something has gone wrong.

"If this be the whole fruit of victory, we say: if the generations of mankind suffered and laid down their lives; if prophets and martyrs sang in the fire, and all the sacred tears were shed for no other end than that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity should succeed, to protract in saecula saeculorum their contented and inoffensive lives - why, at such a rate, better lose than win the battle, or at all events better ring down the curtain before the last act of the play, so that a business that began so importantly may be saved from so singularly flat a winding-up."
-an extract from The Will To Believe by William James, quoted in James Blish, The Triumph Of Time IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 467-596 AT p. 474.