RIPPLES IN THE RIFT 2   (close window to return)

An epic science fiction novel.
They had started to call it the Summer of Love; the newspapers that cottoned onto it did. But that was in the USA, and she was in Marrakech. But she was undoubtedly a Hippie; she thought to herself, not a fully-fledged, drug-taking, 'let's-play-not-work type' of one, but more the part about being a free spirit. She wondered if all the hippies had rich fathers, as she did, so they could afford not to work but live like sponges off of their dads's backs.

He had paid for her ticket, but she knew he saw it as a reward for her obtaining a first with honours, a qualification now enabling her to take up a job as a Biologist. She had wanted to do botany and had gotten through the first year when she experienced her first total nervous breakdown. There had been previous such periods in her life but this last one put her mind in a completely different place.

After recovering, she started university all over again but with a new subject: she wanted to understand more about being alive and how the processes of life worked.

Dad had wanted her to take a short break. He was aware of her mental instability as it had been there right from the start: the bad dreams, the self-harming, psychotic episodes, a whole gamut of periods with abnormal thinking and behaviour. The drugs prescribed by the doctors during various periods of being hospitalised eventually led to some kind of stability with only minor breaks from the so-called norm. It allowed her to sail through university and achieve good results. Dad was pleased. The holiday was a reward from a loving father to his daughter.

He had paid for her friend to come too, Agatha. They had studied at the same university, but her specialty was far away from her field. She was a computer software boffin: gifted, as mad as her, and they loved each other as friends.

The taxi pulled up at a four-star luxury hotel on the city's outskirts: the RIU Tikada Gardens.

Jennifer paid the driver, who then helped them with the cases from the boot, but she noted how he had stood behind as they bent over to reach in. Their short mini-dresses were probably inappropriate to the culture here, she thought, and it was likely the only time the drivers in Marrakech received an additional bonus other than a money tip - mainly, a flash of a girl's knickers. But she didn't care. Both she and Agatha were part of a new generation of women liberated by the birth pill and no longer looking at growing into womanhood and becoming little Mrs Sit-At-Home wives.

He took the weight of the cases from them and put them on the ground outside the entrance. "My card," he said. "That my phone at home. I private cab. Not part of big business. You want lift, you call me. My family have radio. They call me if I on road."
"Okay. Thanks," Jenny said.
"You want guide in city? I be guide."