In another, even more fantastic, he was seated at a table in a simple earthly kitchen, reassembling an ancient broken bowl. A colorful thing with wavering and shape-shifting images on the side. He witnessed slim fingers carefully fitting pieces together, gluing them, and setting them to cure in a big sand-filled bowl. And in the background, he could smell tamales.

What the hell had that been about?

Dek shook his head. Had to be side effects from Dya’s drug. Or maybe hallucinations caused by the gotcha vine poison.

Opening his eyes, he lay on his back—nothing overhead except the hospital-room ceiling. The duraplast was featureless and even more uninteresting because only one of the two light panels still worked. The second one had been removed sometime in the past, leaving only the gaping square hole in the ceiling with the wire capped off. As if they’d been ready to put in a replacement but thought better of it at the last instant.

The rest of the room had been painted in what Dek decided to call puke-beige. That was the thing about hospitals. Whoever picked the colors for the walls must have chosen the least popular, most universally repellant, and absolutely sterile colors they could find. True, maybe charcoal black or bruised dark purple, or perhaps a morose maroon-brown combination might have been worse. Dek decided he’d best not mention the fact to the administrators, because sure as fart-sucking hell, if he ever landed back here, the walls would be painted with it.

Not only that, the place was noisy. Seemed to be humming. Like bad electrical wiring. The equipment out on the shuttle field sounded unusually loud. The loaders might have been right outside his window.

That and the whispers. He kept hearing bits of words, often disjointed and nonsensical. Sometimes they were clearly in his head. At other times, the partial voice was right there, next to his ear. He’d turn, looking for the speaker, only to realize the sound had been nondirectional. Real and imagined at the same time. Like an itch that couldn’t be scratched, he just knew that someone was trying to talk to him.

“Learning.” The word popped into his thoughts as if it were an answer to an unasked question.