"Janush, you are the most naturally talented Donor I have ever worked with. I've never worked with a Farris or a Tigue, but I have worked with many Firsts, some of whom considerably overmatched me and had many years experience. What they have learned with great effort is as natural to you as breathing. The question is, why could I walk in off the street, take you out for a meal, spend a few minutes zlinning you working your field as I requested and manipulating it myself and find this out, when the people who trained you and have worked with you for five months never noticed.
"You may have a different answer, and if you do, I'd like to hear it, but my theory is that this is because no one has ever cared to find out if you have more potential. They qualified you as a Secord, slotted you into the Second Order box, and left you there. You were trained to provide carefully specified services, and you did so very well. They never noticed just how well you were doing them, or questioned why it was so easy for you. When we first met, I made a little joke that people would think you had done something awful if I sent you back to bed. You reacted with an appropriate amount of mild amusement. You smiled, and I zlinned the smile in your field, but your provision of Tecton standard support of the appropriate level did not flicker or waver or dip or change in any way. This is extremely unusual in a Second. Channels have been working with you for going on a year now. Why has no one noticed? Even a low Second would notice if he was thinking. To them, you are not Sosu Janush with a mind and a personality and a desire to realize his potential and excel as a Donor, nor are you Sosu Janush who has always wanted to be a healer. You are the Second Order Donor in the slot on the board, and if you vanished off the face of the earth, there would be another Second Order Donor who would fit exactly into that slot.
"I think the way you have been treated has been a criminal waste of a very rare, very precious talent, and if I thought it would do more good than harm I would go back to the Sime Center, grab the Controller by the throat and make that clear to him. See, you've done it again, you've smiled, the smile is in your field, but the support is absolutely unwavering, even though I'm sure you were putting no conscious thought into maintaining it, and there's nothing going on that requires such profound skill in doing so.
"As for what advice I can give you, I can give you quite a lot, but some of it is contradictory, so you will have to sort it out for yourself.
"First, I recommend that you do not make it clear to anyone at the Sime Center that anything has changed until you get this sorted out. If you've had a deep belief in the benevolence of the Tecton to which you have sworn, and it troubles you to find out that things are not as you imagined, I have to apologize to you for damaging your faith. I should also apologize that in trying to assess your potential, I've somehow opened abilities in you that you had not had access to before. This may get you into a worse situation than the one of benign neglect the Tecton presently has you in, which is one reason that I feel such a strong personal obligation to make sure this doesn't happen.
"I don't think you can conceal these abilities for long, so the option of continuing as a Second indefinitely is probably closed to you. The most obvious move would be to find the highest rated channel who has shown any interest in you and try to convince him to test you in the way I have. At this point it will be blazingly obvious that you are not only a First, but a First of unusual potential, once your selyn capacity and transfer speed can be raised to First Order level, which will take no time at all once they try.
"Unfortunately, the most likely result then would be that instead of being a Second in a Second's slot, you will be a First in a First's slot. In many ways this is a worse place to be. Nobody cares about Seconds much, but a high First is very much in demand. In demand, but seldom as a human being of exceptional talent, but rather as a selyn tank of exceptional capacity and drain rate. When combined with the beauty of your nager, First Order channels will fight over you. This means that you will be moved around constantly and be a pawn in the status games of people obsessed with status. You will not be able to take on projects of interest to you, you will not be able to take responsibility for anything of more than a few months duration. Some shallow, vain people enjoy this life, but I think you will hate it and it will be very bad for you.
"At this point you are probably wishing you had never met me, or maybe you are hoping that I am some kind of weird eccentric Householder and what I'm telling you is not necessarily true. I know it's true because I feel a powerful attraction to you myself. Even after you stopped that incredible support-for-the-dying, my thoughts of what to advise you kept circling back to ideas that would involve me spending more time with you. I'm intensely aware of this and I am going to do my best to do what's best for you even if I never see you again as long as I live.
"One solution is to get you into a good Householding which will have your interests as its interests, and will protect you from exploitation. Unfortunately, this is no longer easy. The well established Householdings have almost stopped taking in new members since Unity, except by exchange with other Houses. Before Unity, a Sime could come to the gates of almost any Householding, express his desire to disjunct, and if he was young enough and the Sectuib zlinned he was sincere, he could come in, disjunct, and pledge the House. It was easier for Gens -- all they had to do was donate. The Householding would generally take in as many Gens as it could afford to pay tax on.
"After Unity, it was no longer necessary to be in a House to avoid the Kill, but the Householdings continued to take in some new members. They rapidly found out that people wanting to pledge were a lot more interested in what the Householding could do for them than what they could do for the Householding. So now it is extremely difficult to join a House if you were born outside one.
"I think the best House for you may be Sat'htine. This is a large, long established House which specializes in healing. They can train you, I think, as no one else can. What's more, the Sectuib line is Farris. I think they have dozens of Farrises of both larities. They will be able to teach you to your limits, they have people who can overmatch you in every way, they can really utilize your talent. At the same time, they have lots of excellent Companions, so you won't be in the uncomfortable position of being the only and best. Unfortunately, a few years ago they had some bad experiences with new members and the Sectuib declared a ten year moratorium on even considering applicants. Sectuib Sat'htine has a will of iron, and if Klyd Farris and his famous Grandfather came back from the dead and asked to join Sat'htine, she would tell them to wait until the moratorium expired to apply.
"Now, I have one connection with Sat'htine. My sister and First Companion is the partner of one of the sons of the Sectuib. He's not a genetic Farris, but anywhere but Sat'htine, Im'cholee and Zeor he would stand out for his exceptional talent and skill as a healer. At the same time he is a decent man with deep integrity, kindness and compassion, and he also has a sense of humor. I would gladly take him into Teiu and hand it over to him as Sectuib. I don't think even he can get you into Sat'htine, but with your consent I want to arrange for him to meet you. Perhaps he can take you on as a personal protege while he lobbies his mother to make an exception in your case. Perhaps he can get them to take you in and train you in the interim. If nothing else, he can develop your potential and teach you. For some years now, he and my sister have been running a Channels Residential Facility in north east Nivet. You may not have heard of this particular euphemism, but it's a place the Tecton sends channels, semijunct channels, when they can no longer get any more work out of them. They go there to die, and Skyepar and Roza try to help them live out the remainder of their lives with as much dignity and as little suffering as possible. It's not important work from the Tecton's point of view, but some of us feel that a great deal is owed to these people and someone should provide it. It can be depressing, working with the dying, but I hope that someone will be kind enough to try to help me when I am dying. This facility will probably closed in another year or so, and any survivors will be sent elsewhere. So working there, or working with semijunct channels, is very much a dead-end career.
"You may be wondering why I don't propose you join Teiu, which I can offer you myself. The reason is that although I wish to, and will do so if I think it will do you more good than harm, I don't think it is best for you. I am the only First Order channel in my House, so I can't offer you a group of high order channels to develop your capacity and potential. Although one of my best specialties is developing Donors, almost all of what I've done is make unusually competent Thirds from GN-1s in minimal time. I'd like to tell you some time about how this skill has enabled me to do a lot of good in the world, far more than I ever hoped to do myself, by training other people to do it on my behalf. But the fact remains, I don't have experience in training high level Donors, although it would give me great joy to administer to you the Oath of Firsts.
"The other is that Teiu is not an old respected House, and has always had serious disagreements with the Tecton. My grandfather, the first Sectuib, saw aspects of the pre-Unity Tecton with which he disagreed, and I as second Sectuib unfortunately have seen these flaws expand into immense chasms once the Tecton took over the government of Nivet. I and my House are under suspicion, unjustified suspicion, and if it touches you it could narrow your options considerably."