Candy

Candy, a rotating sculpture, turns slowly, beckoning, her cute pigtails frame the seduction. Hers is the seduction of absorption—a lure that promises belonging and means assimilation.

She is the ambassador of Bedtime Stories for Oankali. Butler's gene-traders do not conquer; they seduce. Survival, for them, is a matter of being wanted—and Candy is the vehicle of that wanting, the non-threatening facade the alien wears so absorption arrives as tenderness. Sweetness and girlish symmetry perform harmlessness over an appetite that means to keep you: consumption dressed as care until you consent. Around her the Swimmers orbit and the Worms keep watch below, handmaidens tending the lure.