Spice Melange

Melange is a narcotic that works across the whole awareness spectrum, and it forms deep beneath the sand of Arrakis under conditions found on no other planet. Everything else follows from that. A distant, poor, unimportant desert world became the most closely held fief in the Imperium, and running its mining became the most prestigious hard job an ambitious House could be handed. The spice is also what allows the Spacing Guild's Navigators to take a ship through fold space, which makes it the condition of interstellar travel, and through that of commerce and technology everywhere. Under the Corrino Empire it was the rarest and most valuable commodity in the known universe, valuable enough that a briefcase of it was said to buy a planet. It smells of cinnamon. Jessica Atreides said her first taste was cinnamon too, and Doctor Yueh told her the flavour is never twice the same, that it is like life and shows a different face each time.