Hanging from the rukh's beak were the fleshy remnants of the rest of the herd.
It drifted northward. The slate-gray sea far below offered no points of reference, and yet the bird knew exactly where it was going. Home was a bright point in its mind. The sea was shaded by different tides, varying temperatures, and here and there white smears told where waves had broken and given birth to brief white horses. Clouds wisped the air below and around the bird, and sometimes it dipped itself through the tailing edge of a cloud, reveling in the coolness the moisture bestowed upon its warm body. The effort of flying so far had tired the rukh; even though it had just eaten, the flight had been long, and the cows were growing cumbersome.
Way overhead, the deep, dark blue of the edge of space. A mile below, the shaded gray of the North Sea. And around it, the wide open sky.
At last, in the distance, a blur appeared on the textured sheen of the ocean. The bird cawed once, cracking the air like thunder. It tilted its wings and drifted lower. The surviving cow, ears shattered by the rukh's call, bayed one more time and then died. The rukh twitched one wing and turned a few degrees to the left, aiming for the blot on the ocean, delight filling its impossible mind.
The blot grew to a spot, the spot to a definite shape. Long, and from this distance still narrow and small. Behind the shape lay a smeared white line in the ocean, evidence of where the shape had just been, pointing at where it had yet to go. The rukh drifted lower and adjusted its grip on the dead cattle. It would have to drop them before it could land.
The shape resolved itself into a boat, and it grew larger and larger as the rukh approached. And larger still. The boat dwarfed even the huge bird. Fifteen hundred feet long, more than two hundred feet wide, the former oil tanker had lost all trappings of its previous existence. No slicks accompanied this vessels movement across the ocean. No port of registration appeared anywhere on its hull, for it was its own home, and it had not rubbed against a dock in almost twenty years. And its true name appeared only in the minds of its inhabitants, human and otherwise. The New Ark was a whole new world in itself ... and what a world.
The rukh cried out again in delight and prepared to make its landing run. One set of the ship's great hold doors was lifting, the vessel opening itself up to the bird, and it could see shapes scurrying across the deck in preparation for its arrival. The horn blared as if to answer the rukh's call.
On the parapet surrounding the high bridge, unmoving and yet more visible than any other living shape on the ship, the rukh could see its father.
As it neared the vessel, the bird could make out the hidden protection that had kept it secret for so long. Just as the ocean seen from on high had different shades, so did the sea in the immediate vicinity of the hull. Great shapes drifted below the surface, their direction and speed having nothing to do with temperature, or depth, or the raging currents. These shapes — some of them almost a third the size of the massive ship — dictated their own direction. Some kept pace with the New Ark others moved farther afield, and some rose from and dived to depths that light never reached. Their shapes were concealed, their true nature unfathomable. They were shadows on the sheen of reality.
The giant bird approached the New Ark hovering lower. Downdraft from its wings disturbed the waters around the hull, creating whirlpools and eddies. When it was directly above the hold, it dropped the two cows down into the belly of the ship — that strangest of places, that dark hole where the light of creation burned fiercely and this world no longer really existed — and looked up at the bridge.
The rukh's father was there. And he was smiling.
The rukh called out once more, its joyful cry winging across the North Sea like a spirit only recently set free, and then it settled itself into its home once more.
* * *