Talking to Patchen Rawls was not easy. Listening to her, for any logical person, was worse. She seemed to be incapable of linear thought. Solid facts were scattered haphazardly through a dense mass of trivialities and cosmic philosophies, like raisins in a hot rice pudding. Pseudo-facts were brought out with a ceremonial solemnity that might have suited the election of a pope, and usually had to do with Universal Energy or the Metaprinciple of Destruction or the Great Consciousness. It took no time at all for Gregor to decide two things about Patchen Rawls, absolutely. In the first place, she was a profoundly stupid woman, so stupid it was useless to try to get past that stupidity to any kind of sense. She possessed no sense. She possessed no integrity, either. In these days, when it was fashionable among the people she lived with to be pantheist, environmentalist, and vaguely to the political left, Patchen was pantheist, environmentalist, and vaguely to the political left. In another time and place, when it might have been fashionable to believe in technological progress and the good intentions of Adolf Hitler, she would have been that.
