3.5

Adelaide didn’t expect anything, until she saw it.

There had been kind of an awkward walk over. Everyone, fortunately, had had the tact not to openly doubt the possibility of Trish’s claims. But the atmosphere was reserved, rather than actually inquisitive. It was good, Adelaide supposed, that people were at least showing some decorum. But they weren’t actually listening to her. They were just waiting to declare victory.

Or maybe Adelaide was just projecting. She didn’t mean to diminish Trish’s intelligence — she was often clever and observant. But the dissection had seemed definitive: there wasn’t really any room for a sophisticated brain, and nothing in their biology suggested such a thing would be necessary.

And, underneath it all, Adelaide kept reminding herself: there was no reason to think these things were smart or sentient or anything. They had one horn, and it had looked very pretty, but that wasn’t actually a reason. They hadn’t wondered if the dawnbats were sentient. Or the eels she’d seen in the river. Or — or anything else.

And maybe that’s why she wasn’t expecting anything when Trish stopped in front of one of the frond trees they’d seen all over the island and said, “I’ve spent the last few days looking at the environment, with my eyes actually open for signs of cultivation and intelligence. And I kept coming back to these trees, and now I can’t unsee it. Look at these carvings.”

Adelaide approached and saw the same gashes she’d noticed when they first landed, the cuts that had made it so much easier to gather firewood. And, now that she looked at them more closely, it was impossible to see them as anything other than the product of the horn she’d examined earlier. The cuts just seemed to match the thickness and serration of that horn. Although it wasn’t like Adelaide was some sort of forensic expert. But, in the absence of some other saw-horned animal…

Adelaide looked at Trish and tried to phrase her thought delicately. “I definitely think it made these cuts, but — well, lots of animals interact with trees, and that always seemed like what the horns were for. And I think it’s pretty functional looking, don’t you? It doesn’t really seem like writing to me.”

Trish rolled her eyes, but smiled. “Ade, I didn’t mean those huge gashes. I meant these.” And she pointed, and Adelaide followed her finger, and saw it.

On a section of the trunk below the gashes, there were smaller cuts that didn’t disrupt the structure at all, carving onto the trunk rather than digging into it. There wasn’t an obvious pattern that Adelaide could see, but there was a break between carvings, like someone had lifted their pen.

Adelaide felt her heart sink a bit. This was just about the most problematic sort of evidence they could have found. If it had been really simple or speculative, it would have been easy to dismiss Trish’s concerns — or, well, not easy to do diplomatically, but Adelaide’s beliefs would have been clear. And if they had found like a little unicorn society with a library and a town hall, that would have been extremely wild, but it would have been really clear that the hunt was off. This was the inconvenient middle. It was enough that Adelaide was unsure what to think, but not persuasive enough to change the minds of people committed to a position.

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As if on cue, Emma spoke up. “How do we know these are writing and not just like random scratches? I mean, I get that they could kind of look like writing if you squint, but it’s not like there’s exactly grammar. There are like five scratches on a tree. I could think of a lot of reasons for that other than intelligence or communication or whatever.”

Trish nodded. “I had that thought, of course. I didn’t even notice these at first, given the bigger gashes. And they could absolutely be just little nothing scratches, but this isn’t the only tree.”

And then Trish began the tour.

***

It still wasn’t obviously writing, but it was obviously something.

Trish had shown them a dozen trees, all of which had bigger gashes on them. But, around the gashes, there were also the smaller marks. They were all crude, but, after viewing enough of them, it was hard not to think of them as characters of some kind.

And some of them recurred. Not precisely, of course, and not even so clearly that you could be sure it was the same thing, but there were four trees that had a carving with something like a U that had a sideways T coming out the side. And three had an O with a line on the top. Again, these were very rough — it was like if a toddler was carving with a crayon. But it did look like something was being drawn, not just accidentally scratched.

“Do you have any idea what these mean?” Adelaide asked.

“No,” Trish admitted. “I am not even like close to trained to do that. And I bet even a linguist would need ages! And I’m not even sure they could do it then. Who knows what their culture is like! They could be expressing ideas we have no concept for!”

Olivia scoffed. “I think ‘culture’ is a little rich for some scratches.”

“How’s it different than a cave painting?”

“Oh come on. These aren’t representational. And look - here, the gash was cut right through the little carving. Why would anything intelligent do that?”

She was right — Adelaide hadn’t noticed, but there was half of a little shape that had been broken by one of the more aggressive gashes.

Ray looked down at the bark. “Maybe it was a way to erase something? Or someone disagreed with the message?”

Emma spoke up. “Look, we are making a bunch of very big leaps very quickly here. We are going from some markings to symbology to sentience. But lots of animals leave markings. Dogs pee on trees to mark them; that’s not exactly writing.”

“Sure, but the bar here shouldn’t be that high,” Trish responded. “I’m not saying we know anything for certain. But these things are making some kind of symbols. Even if we don’t understand everything about them, isn’t that enough to not murder them?”

A voice from the trees responded. “But the unicorns aren’t making those marks.”

ADelaide jumped and spun before she saw that it was Percy, who had apparently climbed one of the trees at some point. “What are you doing up there? And what do you mean?”

“The markings can’t be by the unicorns. Everyone was looking at our eye level, but that’s just because that’s what’s easy. So I climbed up here to see if it would show anything. And I found the same kinds of carvings. I mean, I don’t know that the individual symbols are the same, but the look is similar. So unless you think a unicorn managed to climb up here, something else made these marks.”

And then Adelaide figured it out.