First, Ishmael's use of analogy once again allows the narrator to see the problems with his culture via example rather than directly. In this section, Quinn employs analogy to explain Ishmael's perspective on the world, and he expands the archetypal teacher-student relationship between Ishmael and the narrator.
He realizes that he doesn't want to complete this task, not so much because he doesn't want to know the answer, but because he wants to have a teacher for life, and once he's learned Ishmael's lesson he'll be left alone again. The narrator feels dejected at this prospect and goes out for a drink. Ishmael instructs the narrator to leave and to come back only after he's discovered the rule or rules by which the Leavers and the rest of life on Earth live. All of the species of creatures on the planet have followed this rule and prospered it is only that when a portion of humans decided to abandon the law and live beyond it that Earth's ecosystems were thrown out of balance. For instance, a lion kills only because he's hungry he doesn't perpetrate some sort of gazelle massacre. He says that outside the Taker culture, animals coexist with their predators in relative peace. Then, Ishmael explains the signs of the law that life follows. Through more questioning, the narrator discovers he has three guides with which to narrow down the law by which they live: what makes their society successful, what people in the society never do, and what a person who has broken the law has done that the others never do.
Ishmael then challenges the narrator to find, without asking the A's, B's, or C's, a means by which to discover what the law is that they follow. Ishmael says that as a visitor, the narrator might be baffled by these practices, but that everyone in the society finds his confusion amusing, as they say it is the law of the land and it works for them. The people he visits, the C's, explain that they eat their neighbors (the B's), and the B's eat the next people over (the A's), and the A's eat the C's. Ishmael invites the narrator to imagine himself in a foreign land where everyone is happy and peaceable.
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