Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 610
"That’s not the Flaw."
Axel threw up his hands.
"But neither is mine!" Marya hopped to her feet--her
toes, actually--and began pacing.
"By your account Turcaret couldn’t get any useful
information out of the Winds. My guess is all he had was
limited contact with the mecha--which by your descriptions is
exactly what Jordan has too.
"So how about this scenario," she said, swirling her
champagne. "The first colonists arrive, and they almost die
out. They can speak to the Winds, but the Winds don’t
understand them. So they struggle for a hundred years, until
the survivors have been knocked back to a hunter-gatherer
existence. The second wave arrives and thrives, but only
because the first has done all the rebuilding by the time they
get there. The new arrivals can’t talk to the Winds at all.
"We know the first wave almost dies out, because the
genes that have come down to us are almost exclusively from
the second population. And yet, it was only the first wave that
had the bioradio you found. Ergo..."
"Ergo, the bioradio didn’t work for some reason. Or it
wasn’t enough. And the second wave didn’t have it at all."
Now Axel was on his feet too. She was grinning, and he knew
he was too.
He took the opportunity to top up their champagne.
"And that means..." She paused dramatically.
"Say it! Say it!"
"There are two Flaws!"
"Yes!" He grabbed her arms and danced her in a circle.
Since he was still holding his champagne, he spilled some; it
vanished somewhere within the precincts of her holographic
gown.