m preparation of that day when such a visitation would occur The above material, taken almost verbatim from the Official History represents the received version of the origins of die Fish Speakers and is as noteworthy for its onus sions as for its inclusions Primarily, it does not address the questions of why such an organization was necessary in the first place, and of what happened to those organizations it replaced Answers to such questions are nowhere to be found in the Official History, and what follows has been pieced together from fragmentary evidence in those parts of the Rakis Hoard that have thus far been uncovered and translated The Fish Speakers were formed in response to a mihtar> necessity not as the result of an upwelhng of religious fervor Their foundation was preceded by events covering almost d hundred years, events that fall into three phases the disbanding of the Fedaykm the decline of the Fremen soldiery, and the revolt of the Fremen THE DISBANDING OF THE FEDAYKIN FISH SPEAKERS 220 FISH SPEAKERS The first step leading to the establishment of the Fish Speakers as A military force came in the regency of Alia In 10210 Aha brought about the dissolution of the Fedaykm by various legal strategems, and within a year or two afterwards, Paul s ehte force no longer existed as a military organization The Fedaykin were never a very large group consisting of perhaps 50 000 men at its maximum but their effectiveness was all out of proportion to their numbers They provid ed the spearhead of many campaigns and furnished an experienced cadre around which later battle groups were formed By disbanding them, Alia sought to forestall the possibility of a military hero s winning popular support and challenging the rule she exercised through her priesthood and civil bureaucracy The harvest ot her labor was reaped by Leto II THE DECLINE OF THE FREMEN The de chne of the military might of the Fremen army took a much longer time, was marked by no notorious single incident, and was hidden from view by official decision Hence its story has only recently come to light and has been pieced together by the patient researchers of the military section of the Library Confraternity, to whose efforts we owe these startling revelations about the true reasons for the formation of the Fish Speakers The first bit of information to move speculation in this area came not from the Rakis Hoard but from the Bureau of Personnel of the Padishah Empire, housed on Kaitain In its administration of personnel rotation, the Sardaukar Imperial Staff employed a system of flagging personnel records with differently colored tabs, according to the reason for the transfer A red tab marked the record of one who had died in combat off-world, and whose remains were being returned, black indicated an off-world non-combat death from disease or accident, yellow marked die record of one transferred home for medical recuperation, green marked transfers for administrative and general reasons When die Fremen were organized under the Atreides, the system of the Sard auk ;u was borrowed With tnis knowledge, the summaries of military personnel transfers found cm Rakis became clear The following table shows percentages of transfers for dif ferent reasons through the hundred-year pen od following the end of Paul s Jihad The changes on the table are instructive the 4% combat deaths in the years 10211 to 10220 shows no doubt the mopping up of outlying pockets of resistance where the battle continued in diminished form But after forty years during which combat deaths com prised less than one percent of the record transfers, the percentage begins to inch upward to 2% and 3% of the total from 10271 to 10310 Two possible reasons have been suggested for this increase neither of them flattering to Fremen honor either resistance cells were being formed and operating the suppression of which was producing Fremen battle casualties, or perhaps more likely accidental deaths were being falsified as military deaths to lend a spunous luster to the reputations of the deceased The percentage of black tabbed records showing death from accident or disease, is higher than any commander would wish but not surprising in view of the high degree of adaptation to the conditions of Arrakis which the Fremen had achieved When sent to planets with grossly divergent climatic and social environments many of the Fremen simply did not adjust well These records have not been examined in any detail but spot checks over the century have shown that many of these deaths in the early decades at least, were attributable to drowning, general edemas and surprisingly heat exhaustion (The Fremen metabolism sometimes reacted m unexpected ways to conditions of high humidity) FISH SPEAKERS 221 FISH SPEAKERS As the foregoing implies, disease was tak mg a heavy loll The yellow tabs marking transfers for recuperation, increased enormously in percentage over the period-from 8% of the total in 10220 to 28% of the total in 10310 And it must be kept m mind that these figures show only those sick enough to warrant transfer home those with lesser de grees of incapacity would be treated on the garrisoned planet An astonishing picture appears then in the first decade of the 103rd century many of the Fremen garrisons must have had sick calls amounting to nearly a third of their total force1 Such units could not have fielded an effective force But this decline in the vigor of the Fremen (and such indeed is what it seems) dovetails well with what we know was happening back on Arrakis.