Sometimes I just need to RTFM closer.
I just discovered the problem in my 9P haskell lib is really just that the data portion of every 9p "s" message has it's own size header (16bit).
Tversion encode and send now works via Nine.hs as a client. I am able to get the Rversion reply back and verify that it is NOT Rerror, but only visually by inspecting a hex dump as my instance of "Binary" does not succeed in "get"ting the response appropriately.
Still, I consider this progress.
I've decided to call this little project 9ph for now, (9p in haskell)