"If I say that I am a Gef, a member of the Gaian effort, who am I?

I live in the distant Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud, where my ancestors fled to escape the collapse of the inner solar system. I've lived through decades of factional warfare and police excess while the inner system grew fat. I've seen children born into poverty, labor, and starvation. I've spent my life fighting mold and vacuum, raids and riots, overpopulation and disease.

Maybe I believe in the Gaian ideology, the return to Cometary Man. The amino acids that seeded life came from comets, I believe, and we must in time abandon planets and return to our homes, wandering from star to star down ten million years of drift. Far from light. Far from the Destroyers.

Maybe I've rebuilt my children to suit their new homes. Maybe I've filled my own body with machines.

And if I live in the Kostadin Cell, the Reverend MacDuff's last die-hard cult, I grow cherry blossoms to give to the pilots...each one a tiny, precious use of water. Each one a way to say: 

It is better to die a Gef than to live planetbound."

A Compassionate Sociology of Fringe Habitats
Elder Lin Taudigani

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MASYAF PERSONAL - EYES ONLY - FROM: Thorn

Remember the Nauticus? The freighter the Gefs put a bomb aboard?

It was carrying n-space oscillators. Subspace drive components. We don't know where it was taking them.

But we've figured out why the Gefs want them so badly.