It was an odd moment for dawn to break at last upon the dusty mystery. Martin the Manichean. Mycroft ‘Martin’ Guildbreaker had borne the nickname, and its cultish stigma, patiently since he was sixteen and the Master Who renamed him six. Why He chose ‘Martin’ we never knew. The Child Jehovah was too tangled in Earth’s many languages back then to answer complex questions, and by the time He semimastered speech, the secret behind the nickname had already become a puzzle-quest which Martin felt he had to solve himself. On the ride back to Alexandria I apologized for blurting the solution, but middle-voice Martin only smiled, content that he had arranged the conjunction which unlocked the mystery. We had been on the wrong track all these years, thinking it must be Saint Martin, or Martin Luther, or some other historic Martin, or perhaps the bird, when the answer was in our Eighteenth Century the whole time: Martin the Manichean, the character from Voltaire’s Candide. I got to watch Martin over the next days, as I worked on my history while he, in the corner, read, reread, and memorized his namesake’s scenes. The ancient Manichean cult believed the universe was a great war between a force of Good and one of Evil. In such a world there is true right, true wrong, and Evil was not mere imperfection necessitated by our Maker’s Plan but a Maker in itself, which schemes and undoes while the other loves and gives. This Manichean sentiment leaked quickly into other cults, especially those veins of Christianity which imagined the universe as a struggle between God and Satan, instead of a play where God the Author scripts out rebel Lucifer and loyal Michael with equal absoluteness. The Manicheans had vocal enemies, the Platonists, Saint Augustine, many who argued that light is something, shadow its mere absence, so Good is Real but Evil merely a diluted good, like fabric with too many holes to hold. So fierce were the Christian counterarguments that later generations used the Manichean heresy for target practice, re-proving its folly in theology exams to demonstrate their syllogisms. Soon the Manichees became Europe’s stock stupid heresy, something only an idiot would fall for. But then she breaks, the Dawn of Reason with her rosy fingers, and brings us Montaigne, Descartes, and Pierre Bayle. Bayle raised the problem first, the ambidextrous Bayle, as Voltaire called him, forever seeming to write one thing with his right hand and another in a footnote with his left, confounding censors by hiding his arguments in pieces, as prisoners hide their tools. In his dictionary entry on the Manicheans, Bayle wrote that, for all the centuries of attempted disproofs, no one had ever actually made Good versus Evil seem truly unconvincing as a model of the world. What good was Logic if it could not best this oldest folly? A generation later, Voltaire’s long-suffering Candide pauses in his troubles to muse on old Manicheanism, so abused a dead horse that no one could possibly be a Manichean anymore. Sheepishly his fellow traveler Martin confesses, “I am one, and I don’t know what to do about it, but I find myself unable to see the world in any other way.” Soon, reader, I would have the privilege of watching our Martin Guildbreaker read that line, and understand at last the blessing our Master had given him sixteen years before: “Live on in your black-and-white world, Martin my Manichean; I will never tell you you are wrong.” So Martin would understand, and smile, musing on how rare and useful his black-and-white mind is in this too-distracting world—but that will be tomorrow. Today, in Spain’s cloister, a lifetime’s curiosity could not make Martin interrupt his Emperor’s business for his own.