Smash!
It was good.
Bang!
It was good.
Bing bang clash crunch BAM!
It was VERY good.
The High Mangler walked slowly atop the shaking floorboards, as befitted her station, with her head rotating a little like a tank’s turret. And everywhere her eyes swept, what she saw was good. The production line was bustling today; a cacophony that would not pause, a roar so endless that the notion of it having a beginning was as impossible as an end.
And it was precisely because of this perfection that the error almost escaped the High Mangler’s gaze. In fact – despite her later claims to the contrary – it did so altogether. Rather, it was a single errant footfall atop a discard noise-nozzle that turned the High Mangler’s stride into a slide, then a spin, and finally a desperate clutching topple that slid her to a halt directly in front of a workstation. Still falling, her hands grabbed at moving parts by reflex while the upper functions of her brain screamed at them to stop….
But they didn’t. But she didn’t bleed. But…
This was because the parts were not moving. The screamaphone was muzzled. The grinder was static. The noise-nozzles were disconnected from the thumpers. And the clang – the beautiful, central, loudest of them all – was placed on its side, on its sounding-side, as if it were dead in a ditch.
“WHAT?” shouted the High Mangler at the world, terror replaced instantly by incredulous rage.
“Shh,” said the worker, mistaking the general for the specific.
“WHAT?” shouted the High Mangler at the worker.
“You’re being too loud,” said the worker. “I’m trying to listen to something.”
The High Mangler had worked in the Soundfoundry for all her adult life, and apprenticed there besides. Her shifts were the noisiest, her workers the most furious, her yells the loudest in all of the Clangdom of Clash – not a single throat atop its cliffs could boast as fiercely as her own.
And for the first time, she opened her mouth and was unable to make a sound.
Trials were not common in Clash. Typically everyone was too busy to get up to any mischief, and if they did and got caught usually someone just punched them until they yelped loud enough to make up for it.
This, however, was a matter of a different magnitude.
“TREASON,” yelled the judge from her perch atop the pandepodium. “HIGH TREASON, WITH INTENT TO…” – and here the judge shuddered, fighting the urge to WHISPER of all things “…MUFFLE. HOW DO YOU PLEAD, REPROBATE?”
“Shh,” said the defendant. Her lawyer buried his face in his palms.
The courtroom did not descend into silence. This was impossible. It was located directly about the eighth of the always-beating Upper Drums of the Grand Din and any trial worth having here was worth having in front of a crowd of hundreds, all of whom were encouraged to speculate at full volume.
But there WAS an unusual lull. The judge’s eyeballs expanded during it, and grew slightly bloodshot.
“CONTEMPT,” she hooted. “CONTEMPT OF COURT. CONTEMPT OF COURT!”
“Shhhhh!” said the defendant. “I think I’ve just heard it again! Can you be quiet for a-”
And at the sound of such horrifying prevarications the entire court had no choice but to descend into a more normal, safe and sane chaos. The judge bit the front off the pandepodium in a rage, the prosecutor and the defense lawyer grappled with one another while screeching maniacally, and the jury simply screamed at escalating pitch until their water glasses exploded.
But despite this outer veneer of normality and civility and sanity, the disquiet would not fade. And so when the verdict came, it was of no surprise to see its harshness made manifest.
“I SENTENCE YOU TO EIGHTY DECIBELS,” thundered the judge, “AND MAY SOUND HAVE MERCY ON YOUR SOUL!”
The defendant opened her mouth again, but her lawyer was watching, and as soon as he saw her lips begin to purse again for that awful ‘shh’ he quickly punched her in the back of the head.
“OW!”
The court roared in approval. Repentance was the first step on the road to reintegration.
The orderlies stood outside the cell. Each of them was about one and a half times the height of a normal Clasher, and twice to thrice as wide.
All of them were sweating.
“YOU FIRST,” suggested the head.
“YOU’RE IN CHARGE.”
“RIGHT. WHICH MEANS I’M TOO IMPORTANT TO RISK. IF SHE GETS ME, THEN YOU’LL ALL HAVE NO CHAIN OF COMMAND.”
“I’M YOUR SECOND. I CAN TAKE OVER IN AN EMERGENCY.”
“BUT THERE’S NO EMERGENCY YET. SO OPEN THE DAMNED DOOR AND GET IN THERE.”
The second orderly gave his head a dirty look and cracked the cell door open.
It stuck.
It was a strong door. Reinforced. Padded. Hardened. Reinforced again. It would’ve taken a professional safecracker and a jackhammer days to break it. The burliest maniac could claw at it for decades without so much as leaving a scratch. They were stuck in there, alone with a mere eighty decibels of sound – barely a roar, let alone a din.
Inside, someone had added to it. Torn sheets had been jammed in every crack. The mattress was wedged against it. A pillow had been jammed in the food slot.
And in the corner, with the calm, worried eyes of the truly insane, stood their prisoner.
She looked annoyed.
“Shh!” she said. “I almost had it! You’re being too noisy; shut the damned door!”
The second orderly screamed in terror and slammed the cell shut as loud as he could and quit on the spot in that order. Then he ran out of the Bed And Lament Prison For The Silent so fast his toenails came off.
Unfortunately, his coworkers chased after him. And more unfortunately, no-one had bothered to turn the lock.
Word of the prison break spread like breaking glass through Clash, from the lowest crags to the highest crests of the cliff. In the Grand Din’s Regal Echo, embedded just beneath the foundations of the eight Upper Drums and suspended just above the giant skins of the sixteen Lower Drums, the Lord Yowler consulted with her High Mangler.
“WHAT DO YOU THINK SHE WILL DO?” she asked.
The Mangler considered this, drumming her fingers on the small timpani she kept strapped to her thigh for that purpose, in case the ambient volume dropped too low. “RUN,” she decided. “HIDE. TRY AND FIND SOMEWHERE…” – and she shivered at the thought – “…QUIET.”
The Lord Yowler blanched like overcooked carrots. “WHAT IN GONG’S NAME COULD MAKE SUCH A MONSTER?”
The High Mangler shrugged and accelerated the tempo of her drumming. “DON’T KNOW. SHE KEPT SAYING THAT SHE WANTED TO HEAR SOMETHING.”
“IN THE QUIET? MADNESS!”
“I KNOW! BUT SHE NEVER STOPPED TRYING. STOPPED UP HER CELL. CLOSED THE ENTRANCE. BUT SHE’S OUT NOW, AND PROBABLY LOOKING FOR A HOLE TO HIDE-”
The High Mangler suddenly realized that the drumming of her hands was the only sound in the room but their voices.
They looked down. The Lower Drums were silent.
They looked up. The Upper Drums were mute.
They looked at each other, then looked at the door.
It opened and shut, noiselessly.
And in the room with them stood the worker, the defendant, the prisoner, the maniac, clutching a battered wrench in her hand and trailing noiselessness in her wake.
“Shh,” she whispered.
The High Mangler’s heart skipped, and in that moment of horror, against every instinct that she had, every skill, every belief, every value, her fingers halted.
“There!” said the maniac triumphantly, in the wake of that awful, awful quiet…that SILENCE… “D’you hear? It sounds like something creakin-”
And the Clangdom of Clash, in all its sound and fury, fell through its own basements and through the Cliffs of Clash all at once, its vibration-ravaged foundations finally giving up for good.
The dust plume soared for miles, and, to what doubtlessly would’ve been the gratification of its former inhabitants, the noise didn’t die down for days.