I ended up configuring a serial cable, and running PROCOMM on the PC, set 9600/n/8/1 on both ports, then printed from dBase 2 and set PROCOMM to record the session to a file.
It would lose characters if I let it run too long without a pause to write to a floppy, so I would ctrl-s/q on the CP/M side.
I guess nobody else had ever figured out how to do this.
On the PC side, without PROCOMM, it would be possible to "COPY COM1: FOO.TXT" but I don't know how 9600/n/8/1 could be set in advance (IIRC setting it as a printer to force the baud rate altered the device so it could not be read).
Generally speaking, all of the pre-PC microcomputers implemented serial ports, which is the first choice in pulling data off of them (including binary data with XMODEM and its variants).
None of the tools that you know today would work in something that small.
There was a C compiler for a dialect of C that met these constraints; I didn't have it, and I didn't know C at the time.