The green haze of the HUD was a calm sea, the payoff after two years of grueling, nerve-wracking toil.
REALM STABILITY: 95% (STABLE). REVOLUTIONARY PHASE: COMPLETE.
Each measure he'd obsessed over, each factor he'd struggled to manage, had fallen into a single, glorious, victorious conclusion. The last number, the only number that'd mattered to him since waking in this ridiculously luxurious hell-hole, was the best of all.
PERSONAL SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 99%.
He'd succeeded. Arthur Miller, a 21st-century accountant, had gazed into the guillotine's abyss and emerged victorious.
He let the experience of winning, an emotion so strange and long-lost it seemed almost foreign, wash over him. The leather-bound Charter on his desk wasn't paper; it was a shield. A citadel constructed from reason, compromise, and good, bloody-minded ability.
Then came the knock.
Dr. Lassonne's voice, loaded with a seriousness that seemed to physically compress air in the study, took warmth from the room. "I must ask you to see the nursery of the Dauphin," said the doctor, gazing at a point beyond Louis's shoulder. "It is the young prince... there is swelling. In the joints. At the hip, at the knee... I am... most concerned."
The triumphant green numbers on Louis's display flickered, as if struck by a surge of bad data. They dissolved into a glitching static before resolving into a new, stark alert, written in a clinical, blood-red font.
NEW CRISIS UNCOVERED: Royal Succession - CRITICAL
Louis's mind, a citadel of data and high strategy, was immediately compromised. He was no longer a king. He was a father, and his photographic memory, the very asset which had spared his kingdom, now turned against him with cruel accuracy. An abandoned sentence from some ancient biography he'd devoured ages back battered itself into his mind like a blow from a fist. Louis-Joseph, firstborn son of Louis XVI, died at seven years of age after a prolonged and torturous illness. The footnote had a name. He recognized the name. Tuberculosis of the bone. Pott's disease.
The symbol of victory over history, the Constitution, now rested as useless and cumbersome as a tombstone in front of him. He dropped it on to the desk with a sickening finality ringing in his own heart, and a dull thud. He left the room behind Lassonne, his step stiff, mind racing. The gold-ornamented corridors of the Tuileries Palace, ever background to his political farce, became to him a long dark corridor to a execution. Every flickering candle seemed to taunt him, casting long, bony shadows to either hand.
He thrust open doors to the royal nursery. The scene inside was one of silent, domestic horror. Marie Antoinette knelt beside their son's bedside, her political elegance, her win-scarred composure as a queen, torn away to leave the unvarnished, animal fear of a mother. She dabbed a cool cloth to the Dauphin's forehead. The child, Louis-Joseph, usually a ball of rambunctious life, lay pale and immobile, moaning softly in a delirious slumber. His leg was twisted at an angle subtly, appallingly incorrect.
Dr. Lassonne, speaking in low tones, pointed to the hip of the lad. "The swelling's gotten more severe than this morning, Your Majesty. And there's a stiffness... when I try to mobilize the extremity, he screams. It's a deep inflammation."
Louis felt a numbing horror turn in his stomach, a helplessness he'd not felt since his very first day upon this earth. The man who'd stood serenely against the wrath of the nobles and conspiracy of Europe felt his own tightly-wound poise begin to break. His 21st-century reflexes, learned experience of a world that knew germs and sanitation, came to the fore.
"Quarantine," he stated, his voice harsh and extraterrestrial in the quiet room. "Immediate effect. Only the Queen, myself, and you, Doctor, enter this chamber. No other servants, no courtiers, no one."
He stared at Lassonne and Marie Antoinette as if he'd started speaking in another language.
"Boil all water before he drinks it," Louis went on, the instructions pouring out of him. "Any water you use to wash, to cloths, anything he ever comes in contact with. Boil it first. And freshen the air too. Open the windows."
This last command was what broke their silence. Lassonne looked genuinely concerned now, not for his patient, but for his King. "Your Majesty, forgive me, but it would be very unwise. The air of evening is dense with noxious humors, with miasma. To risk bringing the Dauphin out into it in his weakened state could be fatal!"
"Get it done," Louis instructed, voice a low growl brooking no argument. He turned from them, pacing the length of the room like some zoo creature restricted to its cage. He needed data. He needed his tool. He went to a shadowy corner, feigning a moment of thorough deliberation, and turned inward.
HUD. Analyze all available medical options for juvenile skeletal tuberculosis, cross-referencing with resources and knowledge available in the late 18th century.
For a painful moment, there was nothing. And then the message started scrolling, and it ran like a litany of terrors. The HUD, ever-reliable, never-wrong compass, was giving him data perfectly correct and absolutely, damnably useless.
ANALYSIS: 18th-century medical practice for 'wasting diseases' and 'joint inflammations' includes:
1. Phlebotomy (Bleeding): Theory: To balance the body's four humors. PROGNOSIS: Negative. Induces anemia and systemic weakness, increasing patient vulnerability.
2. Purging & Emetics: Theory: To expel morbid matter from the bowels. PROGNOSIS: Negative. Causes severe dehydration and electrolyte imbalance, accelerating decline.
3. Blistering & Cauterization: Theory: To create a counter-irritant to draw the 'evil' from the affected area. PROGNOSIS: High risk of sepsis from open wounds. Causes extreme, unnecessary pain.
4. Rest & Prayer: Theory: Divine intervention and conservation of energy. PROGNOSIS: Ineffective against pathogenic agent.
He ran down the list, his gut rolling. These were not therapies; they were forms of torture. And finally, in its concluding, savage summary:
HISTORICAL MORTALITY RATE for this condition, given existing medical technology: >95%.
A fresh line of text flickered into life at the bottom of it, a message he'd never encountered previously. It was by far the scariest thing ever displayed by the HUD to him.
HISTORICAL INEVITABILITY PROBABILITY: RISING…
Inevitability. The term was a death sentence. The implication was that some things were ingrained so deeply within the nature of the timeline that even his mighty alterations—avoiding bankruptcy, winning a war, redrawing the social contract of a nation—were insufficient to remove them. He redid the history of France, but he was helpless in front of the unalterable laws of biology. He could mobilize armies and navies, but he could not mobilize his son's cells to live instead of die. The man who had reconciled the ledgers of a nation was powerless to correct this particular, damaged body.
A deep, soul-crushing surge of helplessness flooded him. He was a god who'd learned he wasn't immortal after all.
He wen back to the room again, his face a stern determination molded in the bottom of his abyss of despair. He couldn't trust the doctors. He couldn't trust the HUD. He couldn't trust anything but the simple, piece-by-piece essentials of cleanliness and caring which he recollected from his earlier existence. It was a pitiful, weakened shield to stand against a grotesque disease, but it was all he owned.
"Dr. Lassonne," Louis said, his voice now devoid of panic, replaced by a cold, hard certainty that was even more unsettling to the physician. "Summon the Royal College of Physicians. I want every great medical mind in Paris here at the palace tomorrow morning. Every single one."
He bowed, a glimmer of relief in his eyes. The King was finally following a forthright, reasonable path of action. He consulted the best advice to be found in the kingdom.
But Louis knew what he'd just accomplished. That was politics, a piece of theatricality for the court. He should be doing what all he could be doing. In truth, he knew he'd just called forth a group of well-intentioned butchers, and he'd have to be the one to stop their blades himself. His greatest, most public victory had given way to his most personal and desperate struggle.