The condition I purpose to describe has, unfortunately, no established name; since it was recognized, some decades past, as a discrete phenomenon, there have been some attempts at labelling it, but none have stuck and some have been decidedly offensive. (It is natural that this should be so concerning a disorder that affects perhaps one in two thousand people and, by its nature, renders those people loathed and despised.) Rather than essay a neologism, I will not give a name; when I speak of ‘the disorder’ henceforth you will know what disorder it is I mean.

The disorder, then, can best be thought of as an endocrine analogue to developmental disorders in the family of autism: roughly analogous, that is, both in its attendant disabilities and its attendant gifts. I have said it is endocrine in etiology; but the details of the biochemical mechanisms by which it operates have been little studied; and, the mechanism of the disorder’s chief manifestation being surely of exquisite complexity, perhaps even if it were thoroughly studied it would remain beyond our understanding.

This chief manifestation is a subtle but deeply unpleasant odour, generally experienced as cloying, like rotten fruit, although a minority perceive it as bitter or carrion-like. Nevertheless, as emitted by the disorder’s sufferers, the odour is subtle; and the depth of revulsion thereby elicited is curious. Laboratory experiments have gauged the intensity of this reaction: when exposed to the odour in the same modest quantities as are emitted by the disorder’s sufferers, and then, a few minutes later, retested on psychometric measures of current mood, subjects’ scores on subscales measuring anger or disgust rise by nearly a full standard deviation, and qualitative assessments of subjects’ behaviour towards experimenters indicate that they frequently become rude and short-tempered.

I have said that the odour elicits the revulsion; but in fact this is not quite correct. Rather, both the odour and the revulsion are, to a great extent, products of the same set of pheromones. When subjects are exposed to the pheromones in a room that has a strong ambient scent masking the odour, the effect sizes I have previously cited are reduced only by about one-third.

The gifts co-occurring with the disorder—and here again the analogy to autism presents itself—are twofold: firstly, an intense and strange aesthetic sense, often alighting upon apparently arbitrary targets and often co-occurring with various forms of synaesthesia, so that, for instance, a cloud or a license plate might be suffused with numinous beauty or vile grotesqueness; and, secondly, a profound sense of the sacred, and a lack of interest in the usual frivolities of worldly life. And here we may make sense of the ‘odour of sanctity’ so often described by our writers from the Second Age when speaking of monastics—as well as the fractiousness of Second Age monastic communities. It is very probable that a great many Second Age cenobites were sufferers of the disorder, and thus unable to participate in secular society. Descriptions of alienation, of ostracism, of general ‘otherness’, are ubiquitous in the monks’ memoirs of pre-cenobitic life. As for the communities’ notorious tendency to infight and split, sufferers are often just as revolted by the disorder in others as anyone else is…And moreover we may make sense of outsiders’ reports of discomfort and unease when visiting the cenobites’ communities—though they themselves attributed this to the shame of being impure creatures within the precincts of God.

I am not an apologist for the cultures of the Second Age, but I will say this for them: they did provide a means—inadequate perforce, but a means nonetheless—for the disorder’s sufferers to find community and live, after a fashion, productive lives. But of course the old monasteries now hardly exist. How in the modern age do those afflicted with the disorder get on?

Often, of course, the answer is that they don’t. But the more successful of them have developed strategies—in isolation, from their own experiences of trial and error and from the advice of what friends they can find, since there are so few resources to help the disorder’s sufferers.

The simplest thing, of course, is to mask the odour: to use strong perfumes, to avoid heavy exercise, to wash four times a day. And yet, as I have said, even when the odour is gone, the disorder’s sufferers elicit disgust and fury. How can that be mitigated?—How other than this? The sufferer must learn, just as anyone else must learn but far more thoroughly, the arts of the cultivated, the arts of the person of taste: the different pronouns, declensions, conjugations used across the dozens of social levels; the techniques of erudite and witty conversation, the apropos jest or anecdote, the spontaneously composed epigram; the nine instruments with which a person of taste accompanies themselves in conversation, the melodies by which they sing their speech; the tasteful dress, hairstyle, cosmetics, facial tattoos and piercings, contact lenses…

Not long ago I attended one of the salons of Mme D—; and midway through I struck up a conversation with a woman of late middle age, heavily and tastefully perfumed, her face marked with elaborate tattoos. For some minutes we spoke, I enjoying her subtle wit and the melodies she played on her hand-harp to accompany herself. Then something came upon me; I excused myself and stepped outside; when I returned, I could not bear to speak again to the woman, and I ignored her for the remainder of the salon as best I could. Only a week later, when I ran the episode over in my memory, did I remember the odd character of her facial structure (mostly but not wholly masked by her tattoos); and I remembered that sometimes such a face co-occurs with other things…And I realised what it had been like for that woman to speak to me: that the strength of her perfume was a matter not of taste or choice but of obligation; that the cleverness and sparkle of her conversation had been to her tedious and empty; that the beautiful melodies she had played had seemed to her coarse, dissonant, wholly out of accord with the aesthetic sense of her soul; and that all her charm and wit had been acquired by dull painful labour, labour that was the only hope to mitigate a life of isolation and misery

A. L. Ross enjoys speculative fiction.