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The Monster and the Archaeologists was a 2000 short story written by Kathy Sullivan and released in the Bernice Summerfield anthology The Dead Men Diaries.
Synopsis[[edit] | [edit source]]
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Plot[[edit] | [edit source]]
Benny arrives on Wyzyn in search of the Gundagum archaeologist Professor Uzua Jindah. She meets Jindah's twin daughters, Faham and Faris, who take her to meet their mother, a fan of Benny's. Benny looks at a holoprojection of the vase that Jindah has unearthed and says that she believes that it depicts a Mtongl, previously believed to have been confined exclusively to the Hodge Cluster.
Whilst Benny helps clear a mural, Tihad, Jindah's partner, finds a medium class Mtongl spacecraft in the nearby cliff. Administrator Biima convinces Jindah to allow Professor ais-Ido Niwlog access to the site as a tourist and he descends upon the group with a camera crew. Despite insisting that he is an expert on the Mtongl, he had previously rejected Benny's claims that that they had reached Wyzyn and attempts to credit himself with the discovery, but Tihad redirects attention to Benny. Benny rejects his claim that the Mtongl invaded the Zulawy.
Inside the ship, Niwlog uses a laser excavator to blast open a sealed door and finds a Zulawy burial chamber to which Jindah had already gained access through the mural. The blasting has destroyed the mural and was for naught given that the chamber was long ago stripped of artefacts to be used as scrap by the Zulawy and used as a tomb for a princess. Shati, a Wyzyna, tells Biima that her musuem will beat any offer to display the Uzua collection and Niwlog leaves, embarrassed and with nothing to show for it.
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- Benny hopes to avoid questions about the copyright date of Down Among the Dead Men. According to Theatre of War, it was published in 2466, long before her birth year of 2540.
Continuity[[edit] | [edit source]]
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