The Godwhale

Nebula Award: Best Novel nominee (1975).

As the sand coverer her great disc-like eyes, darkening her world, Roqual wept for her lost, irretrievable, wasted years. She loved mankind, she needed to serve. But she was useless now. Her sisters had quietly sunk, littering the bottom with their skeletons.

But Roqual selected an island for her grave, hoping to keep her carcass visible for salvage.

For she believed Man still lived in his Hive. She longed to feel his bare feet on the skin of her decks. She needed man.

And then the miracle happened; the seas grew new life again. And Roqual, moving ponderously, began the long, long search that would set her definitively at war with mankind...