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“Loki, what are you doing in there? Dissecting a dead skunk?”
Thor’s voice drifted in through the open window, across the balcony that connected his room to Loki’s. Loki giggled (did that sound really just come out of his mouth?); it did smell a bit like a skunk. He might have guessed that Thor would be able to smell it: Loki had opened the window so that the smoke could escape and the smell wouldn’t soak into his furniture; and it was a pleasantly warm spring evening, so of course Thor would have his window open.
“No,” Loki called back, still laughing a little.
“Then what in Yggdrasil is that smell?”
“Um… it’s a little hard to explain.”
“Well, why don’t I come over there and find out?”
“Wait, no, hold on a moment…”
Too late: Thor had already crossed the balcony and rapped on the intricately carved wooden screen door that opened onto it from Loki’s sitting room. Loki hurriedly put out the cigarette in the fingerbowl he had been using as an ashtray, then got up to unlock and open the door. “Yes, all right, come in.”
Thor’s eyes were immediately drawn to the wisp of smoke that was still rising from the bowl, and he walked past Loki to peer down at it. “What was that? Some misguided attempt at incense?”
“Er… no. It was a cigarette.”
“A what?”
“Something you smoke.”
Thor frowned. “Like tobacco, you mean?”
“Yes, like that.”
Thor looked puzzled. “It’s been some time since I last partook, but I don’t remember tobacco smelling like a dead skunk.”
“It doesn’t. This is something else.”
Thor raised his eyebrows. “Would you care to elaborate?”
Loki sighed. “It’s cannabis.”
Thor looked even more puzzled. “You mean hemp? The plant that Midgardians use to make rope?”
“Yes and no. It’s a different strain… Here, I’ll show you. Sit down.”
They sat in the plush green armchairs on either side of the low table in front of the fire, where they had once spent many a winter evening playing chess or just drinking and talking. Loki bent down to reach into a leather satchel on the floor at his feet, and pulled out a small tin box and a cloth bag. He opened the box and pulled out a rectangle of thin white paper, which he folded lengthwise and set down on the table. He then pulled open the drawstring bag and held it out so Thor could see—and smell—its contents: dried plant sprigs which exuded the same skunk-like smell that Thor had detected earlier. He leaned away with an exaggerated grimace.
“Come now, it doesn’t smell that bad,” Loki admonished. “I actually find it rather pleasant.”
“Did a spell go wrong and burn out the insides of your nostrils?” Thor grumbled. But he leaned forward again to watch as Loki crumbled some of the dried sprigs in his fingers and laid a small pile along the fold in the paper. With practiced ease, he rolled the paper into a small cylinder, licked one side of the paper to seal it down, and twisted both ends shut. Then he held it out to Thor with a mischievous smile and asked, “Care to try?”
Thor looked dubiously at the cigarette, then into Loki’s eyes—and he frowned. “Are you well? Your eyes look bloodshot. Have you been reading late into the night again?”
Loki grinned lazily. “Yes, but that’s neither here nor there. It’s a side effect of smoking cannabis—or marijuana, as they call it in Mexico and environs.”
“Hmm,” Thor said doubtfully. “I think perhaps I’ll keep to alcohol.”
He headed for the door onto the balcony, and Loki followed him, holding his cigarette in one hand and the cloth bag and tin of rolling papers in the other. There was a small wrought-iron table on the balcony with two chairs; Loki sat in one and lit his cigarette with a touch of his finger. Thor walked toward the screen door into his room, then turned back to Loki and asked, “Should I fetch you a cup as well?”
Loki raised his eyebrows; he hadn’t thought Thor would stay and keep him company in the presence of the objectionable smell. He expelled the smoke he had been holding in his mouth, then coughed rather more violently than Thor had been expecting. After clearing his throat, he said, “Yes, please, since you’re offering.” He flashed a smile. “I enjoy the way the effects of cannabis and alcohol combine.”
Shaking his head, Thor disappeared briefly into his room. He reemerged carrying a bottle of mead he had pilfered from the kitchen cellars and two silver goblets. He sat down, filled the two goblets, handed one to Loki, lifted the other himself, and toasted, “To the peace and safety of the Nine Realms.” Loki hefted his cup in silent agreement, and they both drank.
“So, where did you find this… substance?” Thor asked.
“The city of New Orleans, on the Midgardian continent of North America. A ways west and somewhat south of our old haunts.”
“I know where North America is,” Thor said irritably.
“Of course,” Loki said soothingly.
“What do they use it for? The cannabis, I mean?”
“Recreation, mostly. It induces a pleasantly relaxed sense of well-being. It can also heighten one’s awareness of sensory details and susceptibility to humor.”
“I see,” Thor said, still sounding skeptical, while lifting his goblet to his lips.
“It is especially popular at establishments dedicated to a new style of music called jazz,” Loki continued. He inhaled again from his cigarette, held the breath, and exhaled the oddly fragrant smoke. “I’m not sure how well I like jazz as a musical genre, but I certainly like it better under the combined influence of alcohol and marijuana.”
Thor shook his head. “I don’t understand how you manage to keep up with cultural developments in Midgard. They happen too fast for me—as soon as one kind of music stops sounding like senseless noise, or a style of clothing stops looking completely outlandish, they’ve invented another.”
“You do have to make a bit of an effort,” Loki said dryly. “It’s not as if Midgard publishes a guidebook every century apprising the rest of the Realms of its latest customs. One section for each continent.” Loki found himself strangely taken with the idea. “Though it would be quite helpful if they did.”
Thor paused while bringing his cup to his lips and stared at Loki over the top of it. “Did you just giggle?”
“What? No.” Loki reflected on the sound he had allowed to escape, again. “Maybe.”
“I don’t think I’ve heard you giggle that way since we were children and you’d learned how to cast glamors on other people and decided to practice on our unsuspecting tutor.”
Loki giggled even harder. “You can’t deny that you thought it was funny, too.”
“Of course I thought it was funny. It was funny.” Thor drained his cup and set it down with a solid thunk. “All right, it appears that I must try this new plant.”
“Because I giggled?” Loki did it again.
“You seem to be enjoying yourself more than you have in quite some time,” Thor said gently. Loki had been quiet and withdrawn in recent years, Thor had noticed, spending more and more time alone in his rooms, eating little, seeming seldom to smile. But the one time Thor had said anything about it, Loki had snapped at him that nothing was wrong and anyway it was none of his business, so Thor was hesitant to approach any nearer to the topic than a vague allusion.
Loki either missed Thor’s cautious expression of concern or ignored it. “Not since the last time I smoked, anyway,” he quipped, handing the cigarette over.
Thor sipped the smoke from the cigarette as if it were a pipe. “I have to say I prefer the taste of tobacco,” he remarked.
“No, no,” said Loki. “You have to inhale it so that it can enter your bloodstream. Never mind the flavor.”
Thor tried again, first sipping the smoke into his mouth and then opening his throat to draw it into his lungs. Norns, it burned! He found himself coughing even more violently than Loki had; his whole airway seemed to ache. When the coughing finally subsided, he hurriedly poured himself some more mead and took several gulps to try to cool his throat.
“Something tells me I’m still not doing it right,” he said hoarsely when he had recovered enough to speak.
Loki was snickering at him. “No, you did quite well,” he assured Thor. “You want to cough—that’s how you know you’re getting it properly in your lungs.”
“Perhaps this isn’t for me after all,” Thor said, his voice still gravelly. He handed the cigarette back to Loki and rubbed the front of his neck, as if he could soothe his aching throat from the outside.
“Give it a few minutes,” Loki said slyly. He took another pull from the cigarette and tapped it on the railing of the balcony to shake the ashes off onto the ground below.
Thor sighed, leaned back in his chair, and took another long draught of his mead. He was relieved to see Loki in such good spirits, and appreciated the opportunity for a relaxed conversation between the two of them. He couldn’t remember the last time they had sat here together on their balcony, sharing a bottle of mead, sometimes smoking a pipe. He missed his brother—or maybe he missed who his brother had been a century ago.
“Since it appears you have been to Midgard recently, how fares the central realm? Anything else of interest to report from your visit?”
“I’m sure you the heard news of the Great War,” Loki said with a dark expression on his face as he handed the cigarette back to Thor.
“I heard that there was one, of course, but I know little about it,” Thor replied before taking another pull from the cigarette. It was less painful this time.
Loki shook his head. “I’ve seen some pointless wars in my life—I’ve even fought in some—but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a war quite as pointless, as stupid, as this one.”
“Really? What was it about?” Thor asked. He was starting to feel a bit lightheaded, however, and wasn’t sure he actually cared.
“Nothing, really,” Loki replied. “An assassination—a network of alliances—bizarre conceptions of ethnic identity. Nation-states were an idiotic idea. Supranational empires are really much more effective. I had such high hopes for Napoleon…”
Thor thought he remembered the important details about Napoleon, but he wasn’t at all sure he knew what a “nation-state” was. He didn’t ask; he didn’t want to appear foolish and ignorant in front of Loki (any more so than Loki already thought him), and his brain was feeling far too fuzzy to want to talk about politics. “How have Midgardians been responding to the war?” he asked.
“Nihilism,” said Loki. “Hedonism. Sexual mores are loosening, barriers of gender and class starting to crumble everywhere in the northern hemisphere.” He grinned broadly. “It’s delightful, really. North America has done especially well: they were involved enough in the war to be disillusioned by it, but they didn’t see large swathes of their land and population razed.”
“Did you mostly spend your time in North America, then?” Thor asked, trying his best to show kindly interest in his brother’s doings and ignore the feeling that his head had come loose from his body and was floating away.
“Mostly, yes,” said Loki. “But I did spend a memorable few weeks in Berlin, as well.”
“Berlin?” The name sounded familiar, but Thor’s memory was working slowly. “That little one-horse town in the northeast German swamps?”
Loki snorted. “Not since the eighteenth century, brother mine. That one-horse swamp town is now a booming metropolis… with a very interesting night life. It was hit hard by Germany’s loss in the war, and nihilism and hedonism are most certainly the order of the day.”
“Did you… take part in Berlin’s interesting night life?” Thor asked, feeling an unpleasant twinge in his stomach.
Loki looked at him for a moment, his expression inscrutable. “I observed, but participating… isn’t really my style.” He took a last pull from the cigarette, which was down to just a short nub, held the smoke in his lungs for a few seconds before exhaling it, then extinguished the cigarette on the balcony railing and threw the remains down to the gravel path in the garden below.
“Then I spent some time in New York and New Orleans—both in North America,” Loki continued, as he pulled another paper out of the tin, crumbled some more of the dried sprigs onto it, and rolled it into a cigarette. “Would you like one?” he asked, holding it out to Thor.
Thor was finding the floaty feeling induced by the cannabis surprisingly pleasant. “Yes, please,” he said, and took the cigarette from Loki’s fingers. He didn’t have any matches with him. “Could you—?”
Once more, Loki lit the end of the cigarette with a brief touch of his index finger. Thor found the delicate movement oddly compelling. He inhaled the smoke again, held it for a few seconds as Loki had, exhaled. He coughed again, but not as violently as before.
Loki rolled another cigarette for himself while he continued talking. “I first encountered this substance during my stay in New York. They call it ‘tea’ there, euphemistically.”
Thor snorted. Tea, indeed. He was feeling pleasantly relaxed, as Loki had promised, and found himself smiling slightly for no real reason. “In establishments dedicated to ‘jazz’?”
Loki nodded. “The musical styles and surrounding cultures are slightly different in the two places, but there’s a definite unity to the movement.” He lit his cigarette and inhaled from it, an expression of concentration on his face as he held in the smoke. “There’s a group of people in North America whose ancestors were brought from Africa as slaves…” He trailed off, looking suddenly self-conscious. “Stop me if you’re not interested; I tend to ramble when I smoke. I’ve been told I can become tiresome.”
Thor felt a pang of guilt; he had certainly told Loki often enough that he was becoming tiresome when he started to ramble about magical theory or Midgardian philosophy, which was a peculiar hobby-horse of his. Thor wondered if being told too many times that he was tiresome had anything to do with Loki’s recent reticence. “No, no, of course I’m interested. A group of people whose ancestors were slaves…?”
“From Africa, yes. You do know…”
“Where Africa is, yes, thank you, Loki.”
“Anyway, slavery was ended in North America, what, sixty years ago now…”
“That recently?” Thor whistled.
“Yes, well, it is Midgard. And there’s still a great deal of prejudice and stigma directed toward the descendants of the slaves. They’re called Black people—or ‘Negroes,’ which just means ‘black’ in another language—because their skin is usually darker, though it’s not really black. More like Heimdall’s color at the darker end, or like that one prison guard at the lighter—you know the one I mean? Other people in North America tend to regard them much in the way we regard the Frost Giants…”
“Just because of their skin color?” Thor asked, incredulous.
“Well, not because of it, exactly… other differences are alleged, naturally. But of course it is quite ridiculous, because their ‘races’ (as they call them) are much more closely related to each other than Aesir and Frost Giants are.”
Thor frowned. “This is just in North America, though?”
Loki laughed. “Oh, of course not. People with European ancestors look down on people of African descent all over Midgard, though it’s especially bad in North America. And in Europe there’s a group whose ancestors came from the Levant—you know, just east of the Mediterranean Sea—who worship a different god than most Europeans—well, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but never mind—and they might as well be Frost Giants, for the way other Europeans look at them.”
“What, is their skin a different color, too?” Thor had enough trouble keeping track of Midgardian rivalries without the fog in his head.
“Not really,” Loki replied. “There are a few characteristic physical traits, though they’re not consistent. Long, arched nose; dark curly hair.” Loki stopped short, his lips pressed tightly together. “In general, they don’t look any more different from other Europeans than I do from you,” he forced himself to say good-humoredly. “In fact, I was given rather shoddy service at a few restaurants—and even turned away from one inn that I was certain still had vacancies—which was very puzzling until I realized that they thought I was Jewish… a member of this group, I mean.”
“Huh,” said Thor disgustedly, bringing his cigarette to his lips. Loki paused to watch him, just to see whether he’d mastered the technique, of course.
Loki cleared his throat. “At any rate,” he continued, “the animus toward them centers on their supposed character: greedy, ambitious, deceitful; physically weak, but clever and devious enough to gain power through indirect means.” Me again. Too interested in scholarly pursuits, not enough in manly physical activities; prone to neurosis. All too quickly, the list of anti-Semitic stereotypes that he had heard tossed around in Berlin had turned into a catalogue of Loki’s own inadequacies. While Thor is the very embodiment of the ‘Aryan ideal.’
This topic of conversation was dragging Loki out of his chemically induced euphoria. His fingers shaking slightly, he took another pull from his cigarette, trying (unsuccessfully) to smooth the troubled expression from his face. Thor was troubled, too, to hear this news of Midgard, but he knew it wasn’t for Asgard to meddle in the internal affairs of other realms—not until they spilled over to threaten other branches of Yggdrasil.
Loki shook his head as if to clear it. “I was saying, though—these Black people in North America, they’re the ones who invented jazz, though other groups have taken it up as well. They’re leading a bit of a cultural renaissance in their country. They even call it that in New York: the Negro Renaissance.” Loki paused to tap some ash off the end of his cigarette. “You remember the Renaissance in Europe?”
Thor exhaled the smoke he had been holding in, coughed once, then said, “Vaguely.” He coughed again and cleared his throat. “But I’ve never watched Midgard’s progress as closely as you do.”
“It was magnificent,” said Loki, a broad, unguarded smile lighting his whole face. “Like watching desert flowers open after rainfall.” Thor could have said the same thing about Loki at that moment, and it saddened him to think how seldom he saw that unadulterated joy from his brother anymore.
“The way they started to think,” Loki went on, caught up in his enthusiasm, “to question everything they had always taken for granted. It hasn’t stopped, either; their world is turned upside down about once a century, these days.” He paused to inhale from his cigarette again; Thor did the same. “One thing I’ll say for the short lifespans of Midgardians is that change happens very quickly. At this rate they might not take long to catch up to us. Maybe even in our lifetime!”
Thor laughed and coughed all at once. “I’ll believe that when I see it. They can’t even travel to other planets in their solar system, let alone to other realms.”
“I don’t deny that their science is still rudimentary—and talking about their medicine is enough to turn the stomach. But you don’t realize how far it’s come in the last few centuries! And their philosophy—that is where Midgard’s true genius lies. They ask questions that no Asgardian has ever dreamed of.”
Here he goes again, Thor said to himself, trying not to roll his eyes; he didn’t want to shake Loki out of his rare good spirits by indicating a lack of curiosity. Through an absent-minded haze, he searched his memory for anything Loki had told him about Midgardian philosophers, until he hit upon a name. “Like Plato, you mean?”
Loki snorted impatiently. “Plato began it, yes, but that was two and a half thousand years ago. They’ve had plenty of time to rethink everything several times since then. There’s one recent fellow who’s done an especially thorough job of turning everything on its head—a German, Friedrich Nietzsche. I’ve become quite taken with him, actually; I bought some of his books while I was in Berlin, and I brought them back with me. Here, let me show you—”
Loki glanced at his shortening cigarette, decided there was one more lungful left in it, took it, then put it out on the balcony railing. Thor also took one last pull from his cigarette before extinguishing it in the same way. Loki grabbed his cup, the tin of papers, and the little cloth bag, then stood up and headed for the door back into his room. Thor hesitated a moment, not entirely eager to see these books that Loki was so keen to show him; but in the name of brotherly affection, he picked up his own goblet and the bottle of mead and followed Loki inside.
After putting everything down on the low table in front of the fireplace, Loki went to his bookshelf, skimmed the titles, and pulled out two small volumes bound in black leather, stamped with ornate gold lettering. Thor sat down in the armchair he’d been sitting in before, poured himself some more mead, and sipped it while Loki thumbed through one of the volumes he’d pulled out. The Gay Science, it said on the spine.
“Listen,” Loki said eagerly, reading from the page he’d found while he walked slowly back to his chair. “‘One thing is needful,’ this section is called.
“To ‘give style’ to one’s character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed—both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime…” Loki hummed to himself as he skipped over some of the text. “In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!”
He looked up, his eyes shining, smiling almost blissfully. Thor was nonplussed, and his face showed it. Loki’s face fell a little. “You’re not impressed,” he said dryly, trying to hide his disappointment.
“I’m not sure I understood it,” Thor said honestly. “I’ve never understood this kind of thing the way you do.”
“But the language,” Loki pressed. “Isn’t it gorgeous? That exhilarating rush of words, the rhythm—like poetry in prose.”
Thor shrugged with an apologetic smile. “I’ve never had your appreciation for literature, either. I can tell you are appreciative, though.” His smile turned mischievous. “If I didn’t know better, I might even say ‘aroused.’”
Loki snorted. Then he frowned. “What do you mean, ‘if you didn’t know better’?”
He hoped that Thor was not alluding to a fact about Loki that he had only ever revealed to two people—one of whom was Eir, the palace’s head healer, and that was mostly for medical reasons. In the interests of assessing his risk of contracting a venereal disease, she had asked Loki whether he was sexually active. When the answer was ‘no,’ she asked whether he was likely to become sexually active. When the answer to that was also ‘no,’ she offered the well-intentioned opinion that Loki was quite handsome and clever enough to attract the attentions of some lovely maid, or comely youth if that was his desire, and he shouldn’t despair—to which he replied, a bit testily, that it wasn’t a question of anyone else’s attraction, so there was no risk at all of despair on that score; and she should keep that information to herself because it was no one’s concern but his.
In fact, Thor was alluding to that same fact, but not because Eir or anyone else had told him. Thor was more observant than Loki gave him credit for. In particular, he remembered the night that he and Fandral had taken Loki to a brothel to mark his coming of age—since he was becoming a man in the eyes of Asgardian law, they thought it was only appropriate that he should become a man in every relevant sense. Thor had, of course, paid his brother’s fee in advance, and then he and Fandral had retired to other rooms to take their own enjoyment. The next morning, however, Loki had been less than forthcoming about his experience. The brothel owner did not return Thor’s payment for Loki, but she did give them a rather odd look on their way out, and Thor suspected that Loki had ordered his companion not to let Thor find out that he had not gotten the experience that had been paid for.
After that, Thor, feeling somewhat guilty but mostly puzzled, watched his brother carefully for any sign that would have told him, if he had noticed it earlier, that his gift would not be welcome. Did Loki’s courtships end rather abruptly? Did he seem more interested in men than in women? Did he frequent brothels that catered to more unusual tastes? Thor watched Loki and noticed… nothing. No courtships at all, long or brief, with men or women; no trips to brothels, traditional or unconventional. Thor asked his friends if they had noticed this about Loki—that he seemed to have no interest at all in sex or romance—and they all seemed surprised. Fandral said he had always assumed that Loki was drawn to women as much as any of them (Sif excepted, of course, unless she wasn’t), but was simply too shy and studious to make any conquests; Volstagg and Hogun agreed. Thor thought Sif had a slightly strange expression on her face when she said she had never given the matter any thought at all.
Thor had never spoken to Loki about this, of course (he could just imagine how that conversation might go: “So, brother, I’ve been spying on you to see whether you’re having sex…”), and Loki seemed testy when anyone did ask him about his romantic pursuits (Fandral, of course, couldn’t leave it alone, and just had to ask Loki whether any fair maid had caught his eye recently). That same testiness seemed to be emerging now, so Thor backed away from the subject hastily: “I only meant that it would be rather unusual for someone to be… physically aroused by a work of philosophy.”
Loki relaxed, then flashed Thor a wicked smile. “Clearly you’ve never read Philosophy in the Bedroom.”
“What?” Thor coughed a little as he swallowed some of his mead the wrong way.
Loki waved his hand. “A book by the Marquis de Sade, whose name has given rise to the delightfully useful word sadism. And yes, it would be unusual to be aroused by a work of philosophy… but if it were to happen, Nietzsche would certainly be the philosopher.”
Thor felt his face flush a little; was it warm in the room? He glanced over to the window: yes, it was still open. He took another sip of mead and thought back to the words Loki had read, trying to understand what his brother had been so taken with. Trying to understand Loki was so often like this: like reading the words of an esoteric text, all of which seemed to make sense individually, but became completely paradoxical and counterintuitive when they were all put together. “To ‘give style’ to one’s character—a great and rare art…”
“It seems a bit strange to me, though—the idea of… of fashioning oneself, one’s character, as one might a sculpture, or a painting. It’s strange to think of a person as a piece of art, an object to be looked at and admired. Wouldn’t you just want to become a good person, never mind having style?” Thor surprised even himself with this comment; he was not usually so interested in the abstract ideas discussed by Loki’s pet philosophers. (Perhaps this was another effect of the cannabis?)
Loki, too, was surprised to hear Thor taking an interest in philosophical ideas. He was taken aback for a moment, but then dove back into the conversation with gusto, not wanting to waste an opportunity when Thor was willing to talk about his interests for once. (Apparently, persuading Thor to smoke marijuana had been a marvelous idea!)
“Yes, well, Nietzsche has a habit of aestheticizing things that one might normally think of as moral. And that is because he doesn’t think the moral has much of a place in the world—‘life, nature, and history are “not moral,”’ he says; we impose moral categories on the world, but the world has no moral order; it will never live up to our moral demands. But if we judge the world, and ourselves, by aesthetic criteria, there’s a chance that it won’t disappoint us—that we won’t disappoint ourselves. Here, listen—”
Loki flipped backwards through the book, the tip of his tongue sticking charmingly out of the corner of his mouth as he concentrated on finding the page. “Ah,” he said when he found it. “‘Our ultimate gratitude to art’ is the name of this section. He starts out discussing certain painful truths about the human condition that have come out of science—and yes, it’s the Aesir condition as well. Never mind the details; this could apply to any truths that hurt to acknowledge… About some things, he says, ‘Honesty would lead to nausea and suicide.’
“But now there is a counterforce against our honesty that helps us to avoid such consequences: art as the good will to appearance. We do not always keep our eyes from rounding off something and, as it were, finishing the poem; and then it is no longer eternal imperfection that we carry across the river of becoming—then we have the sense of carrying a goddess, and we feel proud and childlike as we perform this service. As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable for us, and art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.”
When Loki looked up, his eyes were shining again. Thor still didn’t understand why he was so captivated by these words, but he loved that look in his brother’s eyes. He found himself staring at Loki’s face, trying to memorize that expression of excitement and wonder, afraid that he would never see it again.
Loki noticed. He frowned slightly. “Thor, why are you looking at me as if my head had just turned into a pumpkin?”
Thor shook his head briefly. “Sorry, I was thinking.” He thought hurriedly about Loki’s words, so that he would not have to explain what he had actually been thinking about. “I still don’t like this—this aestheticization of morality, as you put it. Perhaps the world always will disappoint us, but don’t we still have a responsibility to try to make it match up to our ideals? Perhaps we ourselves will never be perfect, but aren’t we still obligated to try to become as good as we can?”
Loki licked his bottom lip slowly, thinking about how to respond. Thor tried not to be distracted by the gesture, or to think about what it meant that he was distracted. Just the “heightened awareness of sensory details” induced by the cannabis, surely.
“It seems to me that you’re talking about morality as if it were completely clear what the moral truth is,” Loki began.
Thor was somewhat puzzled. “Isn’t it, usually? Of course, there are difficult cases…”
Loki licked his lips again. “That’s not exactly what I meant—not just the moral truth in specific situations, but which moral code is correct. Different societies have followed different ones at different times; different individuals have different personal moral codes…”
Thor frowned. “Of course there are differences in custom. But there are some things that all societies have agreed on.”
“Such as?” A sly smile hovered around Loki’s lips; one might have said he looked like he had scented blood, and Thor had the uncomfortable feeling that he was about to lose an argument, badly.
Nonetheless, he gamely pressed on. “That murder is wrong, for example.”
Loki’s smile broadened; he was looking very shark-like indeed. “That’s tautological, Thor: ‘murder’ simply means ‘wrongful killing.’ But which killings count as murders? That’s where societies don’t agree at all. Is killing a slave murder, or just destruction of property? Is it murder to leave a deformed or sickly infant to die of exposure?” At Thor’s shocked expression, Loki explained, “The Jotnar do it, as have various Midgardian societies through history—the city-state of Sparta among them. What about revenge killing? Or killing someone in a duel?”
Thor shook his head, frustrated. “All civilized societies have agreed that certain things are wrong.”
“Ah, but what do you mean by ‘civilized’?” Loki’s knowing, taunting smile was positively maddening.
“Oh, you know. Societies that have reached a certain stage of advancement.”
“Yes, but what kind of advancement? Technological? That hardly seems like a guarantee of moral rectitude: the Kree are quite as technologically advanced as we are, but they’ve used their abilities almost exclusively for destruction and conquest.”
“No, I meant something more like… cultural advancement.”
Loki’s smile was practically bloodthirsty. “I do hope that the criteria for sufficient ‘cultural advancement’ do not involve considering the same things morally right and wrong as we do, because that, my dear brother, would be viciously circular.”
“No, of course not,” Thor said irritably. Loki could be quite tiresome when he got into his know-it-all mood; maybe this was why Thor never talked about philosophy with him. “I meant societies that have developed a certain way of… thinking about things. Questioning their superstitions and prejudices, thinking rationally about why they do things a certain way. Investigating the world around them, and not solely for practical purposes.”
“You mean—societies that do philosophy?” The predatory edge left Loki’s smile for a moment, and his grin was genuinely pleased, if a bit smug. Then the mischief returned to his eyes, and the hunt was on again. “Supposing there is some coherent standard for cultural advancement, how do we know which societies have reached it? Or whether any of them have? How do we know that the societies we think of as advanced are making the right judgments about what’s right and wrong? That they won’t start changing their views once they’ve advanced just a bit further?”
Thor frowned. “I suppose there is such a thing as moral progress—but I can’t imagine that everyone in Asgard and Vanaheim and Xandar would wake up one day and realize that kidnapping children is perfectly all right, or that there’s something deeply immoral about wearing blue on Wednesdays.”
“Let’s take a concrete example.” Loki’s smile still looked hungry, but it wasn’t the predatory hunger it had shown just a moment ago. “Every society that we might consider advanced by any criteria—technological or cultural—has had a taboo against incest. But what makes us think that it is really, truly morally wrong?”
Thor’s breath caught. “Well, it certainly makes sense—children born of incestuous unions, especially several generations of them, are more likely to be born with deformities, or congenital diseases…”
“All right, but what if precautions were taken to prevent conception? Or—what about relations between family members of the same sex?”
Thor felt his heart beating faster, and its erratic thumping seemed to be located nearer his throat than usual. He was frozen in place as Loki stood, walked deliberately around the table, and leaned over Thor’s chair, his fists resting on its arms. Thor knew what he was going to do, and something in his brain screamed wrong, but he also couldn’t bring himself to move. Loki rested one knee on the seat of the chair, his leg brushing lightly against Thor’s; then he leaned forward and pressed his lips against his brother’s. For reasons he didn’t want to think about, Thor found his mouth opening under Loki’s, letting in the questing tip of his tongue, meeting it with his own. Loki’s movements were a bit clumsy—Thor had reason to think he had never really done this before—but his smell was heady, at once deeply familiar and utterly new, and his tongue tasted of ash and honey and something undefinable.
Finally Loki pulled away, much too soon and not nearly soon enough, and grinned down at Thor’s shocked expression. He had wanted to do that for ages, but he could never think of a pretext; and what better than the influence of foreign drugs, combined with the desire to prove a point? Well, he had answered one question about himself: he was not completely uninterested in the pleasures of the flesh; he only wanted the one person he could never have. The one person he wanted to have because he was everything Loki could never be: all easy, open warmth, guileless joy, effortless strength; the sun shining through stormclouds, made flesh. The Aryan ideal, indeed.
“Well, Thor? Did the earth cry out against us? Has the sky fallen around our ears?”
“No, but—” Thor tried to gather his scattered wits. He had no idea what that was about, but figured it was safest to treat it as a joke. “Norns, Loki, the lengths you’ll go to just to win an argument…”
‘Just’? Loki thought. Well, if it comforted Thor to think so, let him. “No, but…?”
“But it still felt… wrong.”
Loki pushed away from Thor’s chair, stood upright, and folded his arms. He felt stung, unexpectedly, but was quick to hide it behind his air of arch playfulness. “Wrong how? Did you feel outrage? Indignation? Or something more like… disgust?”
Thor paused, unsure what to say. Disgust was not the word he would have chosen, but… it had felt something like nausea. Or that adrenaline-intoxicated point where nausea and hunger meet.
Loki took his silence as an answer. “And that, brother, is the power of the morality of mores—of custom. You can’t think of a reason why it was wrong; no one was harmed, no one’s rights violated. But custom tells you it was wrong: something we just don’t do. And your reaction—disgust, not indignation—was fundamentally an aesthetic one.”
Thor shook his head, trying to banish the feeling of Loki’s lips on his, the memory of his newly novel smell. “I think I lost track of what point you were making.”
Loki sat down again in his own chair, picked up his long-forgotten mead goblet, and took a sip. “The point, Thor, is that morality has been half aesthetic—or more than half—for all of history, and long before. Nietzsche is not afraid to acknowledge that; in fact, he embraces it, and all its consequences.”
“What consequences are those?” Thor asked, also taking a sip of his mead. He was relieved that Loki had reminded him of it; it gave him something to do with his hands.
“That we needn’t fear guiding our lives, at least sometimes, by aesthetic standards. That the standards of morality are never beyond question. They are, after all, partly a matter of taste.”
“I don’t think you’ve ever hesitated to guide your life by aesthetic standards,” Thor said dryly, thinking of the elaborate yet elegant cut of the armor Loki had designed for himself. Then he took another hurried gulp of mead when he realized how his remark could be interpreted, in light of recent events.
Loki’s mouth quirked into a half-smile; he knew both how Thor did and did not want his statement to be read. “It appears I’ve been a Nietzschean since before Nietzsche was born,” he said.
Thor drained his cup and said, “Well, thank you for the new experience—the cannabis, I meant,” he added hurriedly, as Loki chuckled at him wickedly. “And thanks for the news of Midgard, and the… enlightening discussion. But the hour is late, and I think it is time for me to retire.”
“Of course,” said Loki. “I’ll let you know if I happen upon any more… intriguing substances in my travels.”
“Yes, thank you, I would—appreciate that,” said Thor. He grabbed the cups he had brought from his room and headed toward the door onto the balcony; Loki opened it for him, said “Good night” as he passed through, then closed the door behind him and leaned his back against it with a sigh.
He didn’t know what he had been hoping would happen. The kiss had been everything he had expected: like drinking sunshine and lightning all at once; like rain quenching the thirst of the desert, if only for a moment. What he hadn’t entirely expected, though, was that Thor had kissed back. He felt like he had won a great victory—not because he had won the philosophical argument (that was taking sweets from a baby, with Thor), or because he thought the evening’s events would lead to anything further (he had not lied to Eir, at least in answer to her medical question).
No: Loki’s victory was this evidence that Thor, the favored son, the golden prince of Asgard, also wanted something he could not have. It was only one thing, and it could not make up for the centuries Loki had spent watching Thor effortlessly receive everything he could possibly desire, everything Loki was denied. But Loki took his victories where he found them. He wondered whether, if it was in his power, he would withhold himself just so that there would always be that one thing Thor wanted but could not have. Of course, Loki would also be denying himself something he wanted; but no one had ever accused him of being unwilling to cut off his nose to spite his face.
He went to put the Nietzsche books back on the shelf, next to the collection of The Complete Works of Shakespeare he had acquired the last time he was in Midgard, almost fifty years ago now. He was reminded of one of the plays he had seen during that trip (he stayed in London for a few months, and spent much of his time at the theater; that did seem to be London’s specialty). It had been written as a comedy three centuries before, but was now being staged as the tragedy it fundamentally was. Two scenes stood out (impossible that they had been written for a comedy), and Loki had read over them several times in the volume he had bought. “If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” And the line he could well imagine himself uttering: “If every ducat in six thousand ducats were in six parts, and every part a ducat, I would not draw them. I would have my bond.”
Loki smiled to himself as he recalled another line of Nietzsche’s: “It is inhuman to bless where one is cursed.” Yes, he would choose the aesthetic over the moral any day.