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“Honestly, I didn’t think I’d like it,” Percy said. “I thought, you know, what are they going to be able to teach me? Like, if I want to know something about cuttlefish, I can just ask a cuttlefish. But Annabeth really wanted me to try. And it turns out that humans actually know a lot about fish that fish don’t know about fish—no offense.”
The sunfish did nothing to indicate offense.
“It’s like how if I want to know something about human brains, I have to check with a neurologist. I can’t magically figure it out just because I am mostly a human and I can talk to humans. I did ask a cuttlefish about whether he had conscious control over his ventral siphuncle once, and he didn’t know what I was even talking about. He just swam, you know? So yeah: marine bio, all four years. And actually there were a lot of good resources in the Classics department that made studying easier.”
Sunfish, it turned out, weren’t particularly big talkers, but they were good listeners. Percy had come up from the abyssal zone to catch the sun a while, and down there everyone was a mile a minute. He’d been drifting with Saltine for a sunset, then a silent night under the wide sky, and now into the morning, and Saltine was still being patient with him.
“Is it okay if I call you Saltine?” Percy asked. “I know you don’t have a concept of names, like culturally. It’s just for me to distinguish you from the other sunfish. You’re the first one I’ve really spent any time with, you know?”
It wasn’t important to the sunfish to be distinguished from the other sunfish, but having a name didn’t make him feel separate or bad. Percy read this as permission.
“I’ll probably go back down this afternoon,” Percy mused. “I still haven’t gotten to meet the dumbo octopuses. But Dad said it might be good to introduce myself to as much of the water column as possible before I start working, and Annabeth said I should take my time. Did I tell you about her Nepal trip?”
He had told the sunfish about her Nepal trip, but the sunfish was happy to hear about it again.
“I’m glad I came back up for a while,” Percy said. “I’ve had a lot of fun. And it’s easy to lose track of direction if I stay down there too long. Did I tell you I’m trying to follow the North Equatorial Current all the way across? And also my ears kind of hurt below the bathyal zone. And I do miss the sun when it’s gone.”
The sunfish implied that they should drift just farther, into a better patch of sun.
“I don’t know,” Percy said. “I think it might all be the same sun.” He let himself drift, though, and float belly-up to the surface to look at the sky.
“Wow,” he said. Birds were wheeling overhead. The sunfish just breached the surface tension of the water with his pectoral fin. “This might sound silly, but I love the ocean.”
The sunfish loved the ocean too. He loved the sun.
“You know, I think you were right that it’s better here,” Percy said. He frowned. “Am I in the way of your good sun?”
The sunfish drifted closer and let it be known that there was enough good sun for everyone and that it would never run dry. Percy was touched.
“Yeah, buddy,” he said, and the sunfish brought the very crest of his eight foot dinner plate body out of the water for Percy to gently rest a hand on.